Dorothy Gillespie

Images

About the Artist      Artist Statement       Critical Essays  

 

About the Artist

Dorothy Gillespie’s illustrious career in art spans over 50 years during which time she has created, exhibited and sold her art work nationally and internationally. At 85, splitting her time between her Orlando and NYC studios, Gillespie’s career continues at a dizzying pace.

Gillespie, born in Roanoke Virginia, declared early her intention to become an artist.  She studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD then moved to New York City where she studied at the Art Student's League of New York and the Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17.

Among her many honors, Gillespie received The Alice Baber Art Fund, Inc. Grant Award;   a Doctor of Pedagogy, Niagara University, Niagara Falls, NY 1990; a Doctor of Fine Arts (Honoris Causa) Caldwell College, Caldwell, NY 1976; an  Allied Professions Award, Virginia Society; The American Institute of Architects, Richmond, VA 1986;  Distinguished Alumni Award, Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, MD 1983; Outstanding Services Award, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, AR 1983; and, the Lifetime  Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art. 

In addition to her demanding studio work, Gillespie served as a Distinguished Professor of Art, Radford University, Radford, VA 1997-99; on the Board of Trustees, Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, MD 1996-99; on the Board of Trustees, Maitland Art Center, Maitland, FL 1996-99; and  on the Art in Public Places Committee, Broward Cultural Affairs Council, June 1993-June 1994; and as Visiting Artist, Radford University, Radford, VA 1981-83 where she initiated the University’s permanent art collection through a gift of her own work and where her work is now archived.  Early in her career, Gillespie contributed to the women’s art movement through her work at Artist in Residence, Women's Interart Center, New York, NY 1972 and her lecture series at the New School for Social Research, New York, NY 1977. 

Gillespie is the subject of numerous reviews, critical essays, film and radio interviews and a book Dorothy Gillespie published by the Radford University Foundation Press.  She is represented locally by Arts on Douglas Fine Arts and Collectibles in New Smyrna Beach.

back to top

 

Artist Statement

As quoted in Dorothy Gillespie

published by Radford University Foundation Press

“I find it (paper) full of energy, full of promise.  It has a feeling all its own, a life all its own.  For me, it is unblemished, like youth—a world of magic.”

“There must be some reason why we make art, why it becomes priceless; the question has almost nothing to do with analysis—why some art is bigger than life and lasts longer than individual life.  The artists I know with this respect for art had the feeling they wanted to do something terribly important and were willing to sacrifice everything for it.”

“The dedication of a life to producing works which have no practical purpose, which may or may not be preserved, which may or may not be sold, which may or may not be exhibited and which may or may not be worth the original costs of materials, is a curious phenomenon that has existed in all civilizations.  The creative artist is truly the great adventurer of all times.”

 

back to top

Critical Essays

Excerpts from  Dorothy Gillespie

 published by Radford University Foundation Press

 

“A Life in Art” by Virginia Rembert

“From the beginning, Gillespie found correspondences between her abstract and realistic styles.  …As Gillespie’s works became undeniably abstract, she simply clarified the contours of the shapes and heightened them in hue.  An additional element relating her late to her early style is an outstanding sense of imminent movement.

To Gillespie the full shift into abstraction was a real breakthrough, and like other abstractionists she projected a very individual style.  …A watershed came in 1972 when she covered cardboard with Mylar and made a construction consisting of eight cylindrical pieces. This was when she started to do “paper things,” as she calls them.  The cylinders got larger and then she placed them in contact with paper that hung on the wall or fell to the floor so that they appeared to unroll.  The next step was to let the paper actually unroll and fold back onto itself as it spread across the floor, eventually opening the way for all sorts of forays including increasingly larger paper strips going up steps or along walls.”

“Over the years Gillespie turned more and more to metal, backing Mylar with galvanized steel and paper with polished aluminum, before using these materials in their own right for works that are as flexible as paper yet able to stand alone.  Being impervious to wear and weather, such materials offered perfect opportunities to carry outside what she was doing indoors….Another outstanding variation on her metal works was a relief, consisting of a large rectangle from which strips of metal extrude in all directions before turning back toward the surface in what she calls a “peeled paint” effect.  Whereas she had formerly superimposed her more muted shapes on a white space, here she painted them with pure-hued colors and continuously interlocked them so that the colors became “Fauvish”.

As Gillespie’s works become more multidimensional, she equivocated about calling them paintings or sculptures.  The question was resolved when she saw the 1979 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum called The Planar Dimension.  Curator Magit Rowell explained the titular phrase in her catalogue: “’The Planar Dimension’ is the painter’s dimension.  Yet, to the generations which came of age in the 1960s and 1970s planar is synonymous with sculpture and planar sculpture synonymous with one aspect of modernism.” 

This idea applied to Gillespie and others who brought their sculptures completely into space, but who kept them (in Rowell’s words) “pictorial through the use of color, planes, and a strongly graphic articulation.  In the fluidity and mutability of her art, Gillespie was extending the scope and scale of Modernism.”

 

back to top

“Works on Paper” by Francis Martin, Jr. 

Dorothy Gillespie loves paper.  It represents a passion rooted in childhood… for Gillespie, paper is spiritual, and its receptiveness, freedom, and flexibility are metaphors for her role as artist. She is paper and paper is Gillespie…Without the special blend that exists between the two, her work, as it is known, would not exist.  “Without paper, I would never have realized or produced the metal sculptures I do today,” she says. 

Since then whatever the material—pliant aluminum or paper—she relishes grand scale and dimensions; when she thinks paper, she thinks big.  It is not unusual for her work to span 150 feet or more, up a wall or into a room.  She sees not only the walls but also the space between them: “Distinctive spaces are truly wonderful, they invite use.” 

The delicate and translucent colors seen in the earlier works have been replaced with deep russets, purples, burnt oranges, dark greens.  Instead of unfolding in tinted steam, Gillespie’s flowers now close in opaque pools of color.  In addition to new color, there is a different approach to forms.  The energetic curls and twists of Fantasy Garden, for example are now tighter, more controlled, as if they are constricted by maturity.  While something of the organic and spontaneous quality is lost, the forms maintain a baroque richness and exuberance.

If twentieth century art unframed paintings and removed them from the sacrosanct wall of the museum in order to integrate wall area and room space, then clearly Gillespie’s releasing of paper from its traditional uses and restrictions is a singularly important contribution. 

 

back to top

“Paintings” by George S. Bolge

Her paintings look as big as all outdoors; evoking the grandeur of nature itself, they aim to present overwhelming forces….The marks Gillespie makes on a canvas or sheet of metal and the way the picture surface retains or absorbs the evidence of that marking are crucial elements of the experience the picture provides…Her images are as individual as speech patterns and physical gestures, both biologically and temperamentally….The aim is a contagion of ecstasy that results from a passionate absorption in the painter’s immediate, contingent situation.

 

“Women’s Movement”   by Marcia Corbino

The following year (1975) she collaborated with filmmaker Rikki Rippp to make a biographical video for the United Nations International Year of the Woman.  Called Dorothy Gillespie in Her Studio, it s a seventeen minute black-and-white documentary in which Gillespie describes the feeling for life, both joy and frustration, that motivates her work.  She demonstrates how her paintings gradually began to come off the wall to become free-standing sculptures, a transitional accomplishment that was changing the direction of her career as an artist.

back to top

“Site Specific Works”  by Kyra Belan

The Paper Works installations consisted of groupings of cylindrical shape, painted both inside and outside, and of various flat and curved shapes, painted with colorful abstract designs.  Additional dimensionality was generated by shadows and reflections, producing an integrated universe of forms.  Self-contained within its confinements, this was a universe of playful wonder.  This playfulness of “moving” forms seems to be Gillespie’s artistic signature and her major contribution to the art of the twentieth century.  Although we may trace the origins of this playful, joyous element to some of her modern forerunners, such as Miro, Kee or O’Keefe, it was not isolated with such crystalline purity in their works, in which somber, ambiguous, or sexual overtones can be detected.  Gillespie, however, wished to explore the feeling of joy, pure, distilled, and totally abstracted. 

The examination of Gillespie’s site-specific art makes clear that her creative manipulation of natural, urban, and interior space transcends that of her predecessors and established her major place within postmodernist art… it is only in Gillespie’s art that the interplay and layering of shape, shadow, light, motion, and the illusion of motion are thoroughly explored, reinvented, and constructed into a new art form, in which the art of painting and sculpture become one and external space is integrated into the work itself.  In the hands of Dorothy Gillespie, the arts of painting and sculpture become one with the environment that they occupy.  She is able to transmit to the viewer the emotional impact of her art: the pure essence of joy, energy, and spirituality.  Gillespie may be the current artist who best prophesies the art of tomorrow: the sibyl of site-specific art.

back to top

“Sculptures”      by Richard Martin

In all the permutations of her sculptural ideal, Gillespie never succumbs to mere formalism, always shaping ideas as significant as the form itself.

In Rain Dance to the Sun II, the colors that remain more or less unfulfilled on the plane are made into curls of energy as they lash into space, letting the spectator realize the unleashed, unlacing dynamic of a sculptural line that truly functions in the three dimensions.  Color becomes released and liberated when it is not confined by the plane.  Further, For Gillespie, the eccentricity of shape, allowing tendrils and extensions, shaggy edges, and frothy elongations, defies any parameter.  She believes in the self-defined shape that defies the rectangle or any other given geometry.  One of the reasons why her work feels so organic is that she resists the easy solution of form gathered, ungathered and then gathered again.  Gillespie genuinely lets forms seem to go awry, even as she so often works on the large scale.  In Rain Dance II the shape is hard to define: it is not quite ovoid or any other demarcated form.

Inchoate, self-determined form is an abiding characteristic of Gillespie’s work.  …As impulsive and unplanned as primal dance, the configuration of Gillespie causes is sublimely organic, suggesting the spontaneous and free.  …A supernatural magic has been wholly invoked in the properties of sculptures to be observed and enjoyed as form and as wizardry subduing nature, defying expectations.

How did Gillespie arrive at this amalgamation of the physical and metaphysical as the nexus of her sculpture?  The origin of her magic is , of course, her assimilated feminism, the impact of Mother Nature and such forms as rivers in their course, stalagmites in their free-standing assertion, and the amorphous aspects of forms familiar and forms invented….Gillespie’s sculptures as her culminating achievement, effects the synthesis of agenda, fully assimilated into the work, and the exultation in form.  We know how humanoid, how natural, even how wonderful Gillespie’s sculptural forms are even while they enrapture us visually.  It is the reconciliation of the formal and the mystical, physical energy and the delightful incorporeal feeling that is Gillespie’s conjuring and image-making.  Simply put, it is amazing grace, an intangible rendered palpably physical. 

Gillespie leads the eye of the viewer through the colors of her labyrinthine ribbons, letting us identify motion without ever being certain that we can follow one line.  Waterfall, color, and landscape should perhaps conspire to deny sculpture and to affirm painting, but Gillespie is supremely the sculptor by 1990.  Landscape Memory (1993)…even takes on the accustomed rectangle of modern painting, but insists on her ability to render even landscape as something fully sculptural. 

Gillespie, the great feminist, has thus insinuated another quiet revolution.  Not with the declamation of Judy Chicago, but with their own quiet fortitude, Gillespie ahs placed sewing and weaving in a man’s medium of metal and of sculpture.  Her poetry of intentions, her lyricism of beauty, and her willingness as an architectural sculptor to collaborate with space are all signs of the feminine.  But is the stitch—elsewhere, “the subversive stitch”---not the rippled replacement for the masculinized gesture of painting, or facture.  Sculpture, as something intractable has been replaced in Gillespie’s sculpture by the bouncy, animated vivacity of color and improvised sculptural form…Gillespie by the mid-1980s was not manufacturing obdurate form in the tradition of male sculpture; she was developing a springy, tremblant, responsive form; she was employing the vigor and elation of things that move and cohabit, not sculptural objects that stand and command.  

back to top

Images

Foreword    Curatorial Statement

    Dorothy Gillespie        Doris "Doc" Leeper

Charon Luebbers     Melissa McClellan  

Lisa Messersmith-Weaver