I feel compelled to begin this essay with a proviso, in the sense that as we enter the universe of Gregory Gillespie the space of an essay is sufficient only to introduce the range of vision of the myriad forms and expressive structures the artist calls up in service to his art and to those who would have the courage to meditate.

Gillespie is patient with visitors to his studio. Dense with materials and images accumulated over time, that spark and serve his creative genius, the studio is a perfect portal through which to enter his domain. He answers questions candidly, understanding the difficulty of classifying his "brand" of realism – magic, surreal, or otherwise, none of which precisely apply. In his funky, soft-spoken manner, he asks, "What, anyway, is reality?" and, in the stunning kaleidoscope of his exquisitely rendered paintings, answers with a sledgehammer. And we realize we are in a realm of hyperfocus.

Sing O Muse (the customary invocation of epic poets), furor divinus (rapture or an ecstatic state), l'alta fantasia (highest imagination – these are key phrases from a millennium-old vocabulary developed to express a particular state that artists reach at moments of highest creativity, when they function as seers who lift veils, unlocking and giving visual form to the mysteries, to hidden planes. Like alchemists, they make the intangible tangible. Notwithstanding the scientific pragmatism of later-twentieth-century psychology, the creative mind remains an alluring fascination and a fact. "There is something bedazzling about the creative act: always a surprise, it shocks with its unimaginable perfection, its strange eloquence, its balance between the fresh and the familiar. Perhaps it’s because we want to make such magic ourselves that we are so intrigued by how others do it." (note: Daniel Goleman, Paul Kaufman, Michael Ray, "Pondering the Riddle of Creativity," The New York Times, the Arts and Entertainment section, March 22, 1992, 1, 22ff. The article is a synopsis of a four-part PBS serie, The Creative Spirit, April 2, 1992 which focused on three recognized creative geniusesÑGregory Gillespie, George Lukas, and Janus Glowacki.) "Flow" is the twentieth-century contribution to the vocabulary that seeks to recognize this state of heightened concentration and expanded vision. (note: This creative state should not be mistaken for surrealism, which in its classic definition stands for a modern movement in art and literature in which an attempt is made to portray or interpret the workings of the unconscious mind as manifested in dreams; it is characterized by an irrational, noncontextual arrangement of material.)

One final note; this creative state should not be mistaken for Surrealism which in its classic definition stands for a modern movement in art and literature in which an attempt is made to portray or interpret the workings of the unconscious mind as manifested in dreams. It is characterized by an irrational, noncontextual arrangement of material. Gillespie’s art supercedes classification as a contemporary brand of Surrealism.

Because we learn by categories, Gillespie himself has explained that his art can be divided into two broad areas – those paintings that respect verisimilitude and those that are based on vision or imagination. But very often, especially in his mature work, the realms overlap. The forms are conceived as much by alternate sensibilities as by intellect. In whatever category he is working, Gillespie is an impeccable craftsman. Scrutinizing the finest details, we see that they are rendered with microscopic precision and extraordinary aesthetic sensibility. The palette, brushwork, design, and draftsmanship are under the command of the facilities and vision of the artist. In this sense nothing is accidental. But duality exists even in his technique, where a freewheeling associative process of finding the image, of razor blading, sanding, and other destructive forces contrasts with the patient, meticulous attention to description and detail. Gillespie’s formal vocabulary is extraordinarily expansive but not schizophrenic. His descriptive expressive powers are in service to idea; the message ultimately clear and straightforward.

So we may enter provinces of relative simplicity, unchallenging to our comfort levels – the portraits, certain luminous landscapes (featuring, for example, a baseball game in progress), or a street food stand in an Eastern-bloc country. Other sorts of self-portraits (for example of the artist in his studio), the early "interiors," and the shrines occupy a middle realm. Then there are the paintings that shock. Replete with gods, demons, monsters, hieroglyphs, distortions, mutilations, and exaggerations, they are extraordinarily disquieting. Here, it is more difficult to realize that exquisite line and technical aesthetics still reign. We might like to take an easy path, and say that art should calm and please, or entertain, or even tug at some entrenched norm. But rarely do we accept that it should challenge growth and perception on such personal and intimate levels. Like the muscles in écorché anatomical figures, our cumulative archetypal private passions and madnesses are revealed.

Perhaps the place to begin to find keys to his imagery is where the artist himself often starts, his self-portraits. Gillespie has been accused of self-serving, intolerable conceit in so often representing himself. He has patiently explained that these are generated from moments of great fear, when he thinks he has nothing more to say, when he faces the blank, white panel that inner forces compel him to transform and to bring to life. What to put there? So he looks in a mirror, and into himself, like a mandala, into his mind. He has said, "I find the world bewildering and perversely complex. Life in all its forms seems to me unspeakably strange and, at its heart, there is mystery of the most incredible kind. To me, the jewel, the center, the most radiant of all mysteries is the human mind. Thoughts are alive –they pulse with life! Dreams, perceptions, memories, desires are all crazily, electrically aliveÑtransparent as light, weightless, constantly changing, blending one into the other in a seamless continuum." (note: “Artist's Statement,” Gregory Gillespie: Recent Painting: The Real and the Imagined (exhibition catalogue, Forum Gallery, March 1986).  From the earliest self-portraits (in formats inspired by Roman portraiture, North Italian Renaissance art, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini; for example, Self Portrait, Torso (1975), with its penetrating expression of Christ-like suffering and seeking to understand, or Self Portrait [1979; oil on paper, 36 x 30 inches] of youthful self-assurance), to ones of apparent repose (for example, Self Portrait [1997; artist's collection], in which lurk a ghostly crutch or a real sledge-hammer [Self Portrait, at Fifty Four {1991; oil on panel, 96 x 84 inches; private collection, Connecticut}] ); to the most recent representations (for example, Self Portrait, Triumphant[1995-96; collection the artist], of the artist seated, aging yet vital and bared to the waist, arms raised both in victory and brandishing in anger, or frustration against limitations), Gillespie has lent his body and face as road maps of the effects of physical processes, of consternation, of debilitation, of distress, of decay, of vision.

The landscapes become the same sort of vehicle. They may be tranquil and idyllic, or they may be in the process of revelation of inner forces – for example, Mother Earth as the slave and home of the seasons, eternally in the process of death, bounty, and regeneration –or they may be the locus of the genesis effect or of dark places of mystery of the Druids, the leprechauns, and the magical wizardry of Merlin; or they may be lush violet and midnight blue riverbanks of romance and sexuality where Shiva dances.

Realist-based art usually depends upon systems of linear perspective to describe intelligible pictorial space for the images presented. Ancient, primitive, and Asian cultures have long traditions of manipulation of pictorial space, as has Western art since the late nineteenth century, under the grip of the avant-garde art movements. The forte of contemporary realism in the hands of artists like Gillespie is to adopt necessary elements from modernism, such as the manipulation of pictorial space for expressive purposes. In the work of Gillespie, this usually signals a shift of attention to other dimensions of our consciousness in which three-dimensional space (not to be confused with three-dimensional forms) plays a less significant role or none at all. These shifts to different sorts of spatial relationships of the objects in the paintings both forestall our getting too comfortable in the familiarity of generic representation, and beg decoding.

The shifts of pictorial space bring startling juxtapositions. Realistic vignettes (placid landscapes, casual pastimes, such as sunbathing in lawn chairs) intersect otherwise quite turbulent pictorial surfaces where extraordinarily active and expressive abstractions, much like Rorschach images, challenge us to focus where we ordinarily might not. In The Queen (1993), for example, the apparent tranquillity of the limpid landscape in the upper left corner is short-lived. The underworld that overtakes the picture surface is seething. The rich earth suggests germination; roots, sexual organs, pollinating creatures emerge and disappear. Behind a strange screened window, phallic energy is unleashed, and, at the center, a pregnant goddess, about to give birth, rules. Each sphere and its inhabitants, oblivious to the other, is busy with its own agendas.

A would-be concordance to the myriad objects that seem pulled like magnets into Gillespie’s paintings would surely draw attention to the fact that they are highly charged symbols. Brooms, worn shoes, telephones off the hook suggest, among other things, new beginnings, paths traveled, disrupted communication; axes and crutches suggest things cut off, truncated, impediments or disability; a tree branch, perhaps, a new family line; a poetic image of a naked woman seated directly on the pith of a sawed tree trunk, "family tree" or lineage, as well as the life cycles shared by all living things. Gillespie has developed a genus of realistic images of people, which he calls "cutouts" (by virtue of the technique he uses to produce them), who find their way into the paintings in service to odd juxtapositions suggesting displacement, detachment, the ephemeral quality of the past and future, of surface appearances, and levels of reality. In fact, Gillespie enjoys playing levels of reality through technique, often actually pasting in postcards or photocopied images, and then overpainting them. Vignettes of real people in normal activities float on abstract grounds. Faces and masks express a variety of temperaments and powers. Compartmentalized bodies, and bodies wound into grotesque spirals, emphasize the incongruity between our sexual natures and other aspects of ourselves, the point from which new life begins, and from which relationships break down. The creative process is usually at the center of things, and is often represented by eggs that are featured prominently, even replacing the eye of God in the familiar triangle. And we can't help thinking, in describing the work of Gillespie, that art and creativity are virtually synonymous.

Gillespie has developed a class of symbolic objects within his Ïuvre that he calls shrines. They are summae of sorts. They are for the most part monumental in format, often vertical, sometimes with rounded tops, recalling the great fifteenth-century devotional panel paintings. Like ancient tablets such as the Rosetta stone, they carry both apparent and encoded messages. They are sometimes dominated by circles and wheels, implemented to summon all the associative powers of such forms – the roulette wheel, the wheel of fortune, astrological, astronomical, and terrestrial maps, armillary spheres, gears, ancient calendars and sundials, perhaps even the eternal, and so on. High-keyed colored surfaces figure significantly. In somewhat diagrammatic fashion, Duchampian-like found objects are positioned, at times gingerly connected by strings, tapes, or jointed mechanical arms, evoking the sense of gossamer machinery and the fragile interconnectedness of things. Measuring tools appear, oddly placed – suggesting things calculable only in dimensions beyond our norms of time and vision, or altogether unmeasurable. Motifs from other paintings, the mute vocabulary of the artist, find their way into the shrine paintings.

The Seavest Collection’s Godmother Shrine (1990) belongs to this category of objects. The term shrine is not arbitrarily applied. By definition shrines are containers holding sacred relics, as, for example, tombs of revered persons or places or things honored because of their history or associations. As places of worship, shrines are usually centered on such hallowed objects, sacred scenes, or religious images in niches. The Godmother Shrine is about absences, passages, the life cycle, and death. With its arched format featuring the head of Gillespie’s deceased mother-in-law, Rita, it draws upon the tradition of Roman funerary ancestor portraits in niches, and the funerary tradition of referencing portals.

A band of warm yellow bordered with decorative tiles carrying stylized floral and vegetal motifs follows the arched form. These sunny and nurturing zones fade to blank areas in the center and the lower portion of the painting, which read as the equivalent of unfinished Sheetrock and tablae rasae. Dominating a strong vertical axis through the panel is Rita’s portrait head. A set of pictographs on a horizontal axis below the head recounts the stages of life. As we read from left to right, we find an infant, an image of youthful vanity standing on a peacock and gazing into a mirror, maturity as represented by a ripe pear and a pleasant vignette of an autumnal harvest, a woman stepping into a dynamic web of portals (the Elephant God, Ganesh) and male energy, and an elderly, seated Rita enjoying photos or letters. The vertical axis, too, emphasizes the life cycle. The glyph at the top, emblem for the yin and yang, is echoed in the ripe pear, and resolves in the umbilicus-like circle, framed by pink tiles, at the center of the shrine. It hosts the familiar image of the pregnant queen, referred to above.

The unfinished zone, below the pink tiles, is punctuated by a scythe. It is the symbol of reaping, but also of Father Time and of Death. Nearby, a jacket, hat, and broom are at rest. So is an empty can. We recognize the hat from the standing image of an aged Rita just above the pink tiles, and sense that these are personal objects. The activities associated with these objects have been discontinued. Likewise, the raw and half-painted walls have been left unfinished, much in the way the color and activity of life is cut short by death. Even the tiles have lost their color here. The contrast between the upper and lower zones of the painting is made all the more apparent by the objects that enliven the yellow border above – the paint brush, the cucumber ripe with seeds, the cock (also as rooster, thus crucial to eggs), and the pheasant, a favorite bird of hunters. The panel is mounted on a wooden base featuring one outstanding element – a trompe l’oeil painted light bulb. The element may seem quirky, but as the light is out, it may be a twentieth-century equivalent to such symbols as the ephebes on Renaissance funerary monuments, who hold torches upside down, extinguishing the flame as a symbol that the life-breath of the deceased has also been extinguished.

A note about Gillepie’s seemingly inexhaustible reference points and his working techniques: Gillespie was trained by the West Coast figural artists Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff. He points to a number of other artists and styles as holding a particular interest for him at various points in his career. These include Balthus, Frances Bacon, Max Beckman, the Italian primitives, the fifteenth-century Flemings, Masaccio, Picasso, Rembrandt, and Hindu, Tibetan, Asian, and African art. But perhaps it is better to refer to Gillespie as an astute universal receptor who continually draws inspiration not only from the wellspring of art, but from the rich variety of sources immediately available in the world around him.

His themes are archetypal, focusing primarily on dichotomies – animal and human, brain and flesh, male and female. "Art should tell a story; it should be the vehicle for contemplation," explained the highly articulate Gillespie in a conversation. "There should be no clichés, otherwise the message is lost. . . . A painting should be as fresh as life and as full of surprises." Thus, as a critical aspect of his working process, he strives to drive his mind from the known. Here is the root of his highly personalized imagery, and a highly personalized technique equally integrally tied to bringing his message to life. Collage, cutouts, xerox transfers, overpainting of photographs, and endless reworking are the tangible means to represent the genesis of idea and the complexity of existence. As part of his design principle, he uses repetitive image sequences to signal time; mirror images, the life force; double mirrored images, time stopped. Mirroring allows design symmetry; a dialectic is generated between tight and loose forms, between complexity and ease. His exercised hand finds a path, driven by the tension between freedom of expression and the structuring of forms. The result is images constructed of expressive lines, which live in a half-world between our reality and fantasia. They are the cousins of mythology's satyrs and centaurs, of Leonardo's chimeras, of DaumierÕs caricatures, of Goya's and Picasso's demons. At the heart of it all is the artistÕs recognition of the tension and contradiction between order, control, and the rational planning mind on the one side, and the open, impulsive, sometimes seemingly chaotic mind on the other.

But attempts to explain and codify pale in the presence of the work. The art, and the artist, are ever-so-much more magical. Both call to mind the venerable dictum, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

©by Virginia Anne Bonito, "Get Real" Gillespie essay, 1998.

For a more detailed printed view of the collection order the book:
	Get Real: Contemporary American Realism from the Seavest Collection Virginia Anne Bonito. Foreword by Michael Philip Mezzatesta, pp. 138, 68 colorplates, 2 b/w photographs Exhibition at DUMA April 4-July 6, 1997. Hard cover $40.00 Soft cover $25.00 To order contact: Duke University Museum of Art Click on Publications