Richard Speer (Portland, Oregon), www.richardspeer.com) is an Associated Press Award-winning writer whose essays, reviews, and commentary appear in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, ARTnews, Opera News, The Sacramento News & Review, The Oregonian, and other national, regional, and local publications. He is Visual Arts Critic at Portland, Oregon's groundbreaking alternative newspaper, Willamette Week, where his take-no-prisoners reviews have won him vocal admirers ("A hedonist-critic in the tradition of Apollinaire and Cocteau, Speer has a dramatic, Baroque flair to his writing..."—NW Scuttle critic Jeff Jahn) and equally vocal detractors ("...clearly has Oedipal issues and should return to the whorehouse where his inspiration is born..."—Willamette Week Letter to the Editor). Formerly a television news anchor/reporter, Speer worked at CBS, ABC, NBC, and FOX affiliates throughout the United States.  Among the national and international figures he has profiled are opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti, composer Philip Glass, U.S. Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Trent Lott, authors Chuck Palahniuk, Nathaniel Branden, and Barbara Branden, painter David Geiser, and architects E. Fay Jones and James Lambeth.  His groundbreaking monograph on painter Piet Mondrian, The Soul of a Straight Line, was published in the webzine Final Cause and critiqued in "The Aesthetics Symposium" of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. He has written about Matt Lamb for ARTnews, the German arts journal Hominum Genus, the Centre-Picasso (Horta, Spain), and the Centre Joan Miró (Mont-roig, Spain). An accomplished public speaker, Speer lectures on aesthetics, journalism, and criticism in academic and popular forums around the world.  He has appeared as a talk radio guest on KRLA Los Angeles, WJR Detroit, WUCF Orlando, KPAM Portland, and other radio stations around the country.