Gregory Gillespie was at the center of my early fascination with painting. He had a personality cult focused around him, and the mysterious intensity of his art, based mainly in the area surrounding Northampton Massachusetts, where I went to school.
I met the man three times, and he was weird as hell.
He was also a real artist, capable of moving the heart of the worst skeptics.
The second time I met him we were at Umass in the university gallery between the Southwest dorms. I asked to have our photo taken together. I remember standing there, really happy and proud to be having my photograph taken with Gregory, but what Gregory did will be etched in my memory forever, he stood sideways to the camera, slouched, stuck his stomach out, and then twisted his neck so his face was turned towards the camera. Gregory did not smile, he just had a distant look on his face. It was bizarre, and I was a little shell shocked by his strangeness.
But there was something touching about his disregard for normal conventions too. I have always gravitated to people who defy social norms and behave in a way that carries meaning for them. It was taken to such an extreme in the brief time I got to spend with Gregory that I think it might have been hard to hang out around him.
His paintings were at times touching, bewildering, mesmerizing, and bizarre. He could make objects that gave something back to the viewer, maybe through the intensity of his process, or maybe through some spiritual insight. The paintings are normally composed around an amazing illusion, either a space so convincingly real that you can not tell if it is painted or sculpted, or a virtuoso portrait of tightly cross hatched lines, or several objects arranged around a mandala, or a still life. Plus, the technique was complex, it was bewildering, it followed a circuitous route through his mind and may have been part of his madness.
He gave a talk at Umass where he told us that he tried to cross hatch a self-portrait so tightly that he would render the pores on the skin of his nose. He said it did not work, but that he was happy with the effort.
Gregory also talked about Catholic guilt. I think David Sandlin may explore that same theme. In my mind these two are kindred spirits in the world of rendering guilt in two dimensions. I would like to meet David Sandlin to see if he resembles Gregory at all.
I think the search for something meaningful, something that would make things okay for him, started to consume the last efforts of Gregory, which were centered around eastern religious symbols, especially the Tibetan Buddhist symbol the Mandala.
I remember seeing a small painting, at the art store on the main street in Northampton, with a small face sitting on a red shape with the words save me written underneath the face. I was not old enough to understand the terrible angst a 60 year old needs to produce that painting, after all, save me paintings are common currency among 19 year olds, but in retrospect I think it is evidence that he was very disturbed.
My senior year of undergraduate school (2000) Gregory killed himself in his studio. People at Umass were really upset. I was really upset. People who knew him for a long time told me that he had shown signs of being suicidal, like apologizing to long held grudges. I know his first wife, Frances Cohen Gillespie, was also an intense personality and passed on from cancer in 1998, maybe that had something to do with his melancholia.
Gregory Gillespie was an artist who created objects which function as apotropaic art, completely independent of the dominant art historical narrative, and he made something distinct and valuable during the process of his life. I include him among the greatest artists America has produced in the last 50 years. Right up there with R Crumb and Tom Waits, people who defy the odds and do something extraordinarily special for the souls of those lucky enough to experience their work.
I am lucky to have met the man.
Images:
Nielsen Gallery
Forum Gallery
