Gillespie has also rolled journal pages into scrolls. They’re tied with twine and dunked in beeswax and mounted into her art. Some of the script incorporated in her abstract compositions is her own handwriting. Some is found script—blocky stencil letters, fragments of printed pages, text ripped from books—even whole books dunked in wax and mounted into a painting.
They’re saved and preserved, but will never be read again, at least not in the traditional way. The viewer might want to read them. The viewer’s brain might feel an urge to read them. But these letters and words are no longer parts of sentence, paragraphs or chapters. They’ve become building blocks for design.
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The continuum is a scale from real to realism to abstract. An impressionist painting might be next to the realist portrait. Cubism and surrealism are somewhere in the middle, followed by abstract expressionism. At the far end, according to this arrangement, are written words that make up your name, built from letters that signify sounds, but have nothing to do with the real you.
“As you move from the object itself through these various representations of it, you get more and more abstract,” she says. “When I first heard that, I was like ‘Yes, that’s it—No wonder I am an abstract painter: I am a writer.’”
To walk through Translations is to see three shows in one. Gillespie calls them trans, icon and pulse. They’re arranged according to her methods and inspirations. All were created in the last year or so. The trans series is made up of five large-scale abstractions, painted as homage to five women writers. These are all paint, without the added appendages or found letters built into them.
“None of them are interpretations of the book. They’re just my response. If they’re about anything, they’re about my reaction to the book” Gillespie says. “I have hundreds of books. I really have a library—and, you know, it sucks when you move.”
Like many avid readers, she’s found moving to be an opportunity to cull the library. Moving helps a reader learn which books are important enough to hold onto a read again, she says.
The painting “Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson)” carries the name of a 1980 novel and its author. (Much of the art in Translations is titled in reference to the written piece and author Gillespie intended the piece to speak to.) The mess of oil paint that makes up “Housekeeping” is busy and active, composed of countless brushstrokes in red, black, white and pink. The busy-ness comes from layering reminiscent of Jackson Pollack, but there’s no dribbled paint in “Housekeeping.”
Gillespie’s strokes are purposeful and influenced directly by handwriting, or perhaps sprung from decades of handwriting practice. Here and there a brushstroke stands out; it might suggest the tail of a ‘Q’ or the cross stroke of a ‘T.’ Gillespie calls them “calligraphic” forms, and says there are no words hidden in the layers of paint. Still, “Housekeeping” evokes written words in a fashion similar to her collage work with text. It sometimes makes the viewer want words to appear. Gillespie used smaller strokes in the upper left and larger strokes in the lower right, which lends a diagonal movement if the thousands of brushstrokes are viewed as a whole.
Gillespie is 60 years old. Her biggest move was probably the one she made in 1990, when she came to Alaska from California and entered the Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing program at he University of Alaska Anchorage. Now she lives in Ester. Gillespie has spent quit a bit of time writing about art and was once the director of visual arts and literary programs for the Alaska State Council on the Arts.
In a 2005 guest opinion to the Anchorage Daily News she described the motivations—and even pressures—that push Alaska contemporary artists toward realism or representational art. The essay was headlined “Does artwork have to look Alaskan? No.” and in it, Gillespie considers whether a northern aesthetic exists. She asks whether the northern aesthetic came about due to the artists or a marketplace of buyers. She asks if “Alaskan” art should be defined by visitors and or galleries or gift shop owners—by people who want to “re-experience a place they’ve visited” or “glimpse a place” they’ll never visit.
Gillespie concluded that the reduction of aesthetics to subject matter is false. Her Alaska experience, she wrote, “is inscribed in the work without visual referents to place” and is present instead in the motion of her brushstrokes and the scale of her canvases.
Gillespie’s paintings might be a reaction to her surroundings—bitter cold winters and hot summers in Ester, near Fairbanks—in the way that some are reactions to books. But just because an artist gazes upon a mountain range or California seascape, doesn’t mean they must paint it. “I’d never paint that,” she says; instead she lives in it, then she immerses herself in a process informed by it. She paints calligraphic stroke upon calligraphic stroke until her layers of colors are to her liking.
Layering might allow corrections, but Gillespie says one skill an artist needs is knowing when to stop. “A point comes where it’s not going to get any better if you keep painting,” she says. What you see in Translations is the work of an artist who happens to live in Fairbanks, but who also lives through reading.
Gillespie’s smaller works are displayed in the series called pulse. These are abstracts created with encaustics—beeswax-fused pigments that artists used for centuries before oils. Gillespie says she’s influenced by the work and writing of pioneering abstract painter Mark Rothko, who famously rejected the label “abstract” even though his paintings of blurred-edged colors over solid fields seemed to define the form.
Gillespie’s “Triad” is a series of five pieces within pulse that seem to echo Rothko most. Each one features a series of similar-sized, but not-quite-uniform, ovals on solid fields. The paintings in pulse are all about the size of a 12-inch record jacket. They’re not just smaller, but also more accessible than the work in trans and icon. The simple combinations in “Circulate 7” are circular orange lines on a yellow/orange field. There’s a third element, a smog-like cloud in the center of the field. The smoggy form adds depth to the yellow field, making the swirled lines appear to float.
Gillespie says the encaustics were created quickly, and there’s a visible immediacy in the smaller pieces.
“They happen faster than the other pieces, which take months to finish,” she says, saying individual paintings in the pulse series gave her “a nice break” while working on more complicated pieces. “That’s kind of satisfying, when you’re in the type of work where everything is unfinished for long periods of time.”
Perhaps the most personally involved are the vertical mixed-media compositions of the icon series, which use waxed scrolls, journal strips and paint. Gillespie is an enthusiastic recycler.
The waxed scrolls in “When we dead awaken (Adrienne Rich)” are twice recycled, having appeared in art Gillespie made and later destroyed—deconstructing her own work and salvaging the parts. There’s a journal in there with writing close to her heart. It was written mostly on airplanes, while Gillespie flew to and from Minnesota during the last years of her mother, Marie Gillespie’s life. “One small one was always on the plane with me, and that was all the stuff about my mother—it’s kind of unusual for a journal to be so focused,” she says.
The scrolls made from those pages were first made for an art piece called “Inheritance.”
“It doesn’t exist anymore,” Gillespie says, adding that “Inheritance” is now part of four pieces in the icon series.
This series contains more complex work than the other two. Gillespie’s elements in icon come directly from her life as a writer and reader and as a lover of found objects. This is where twine-bound, waxed dunked books are built into paintings, a place where words both seen—a hand-scrawled “Private”—and unseen are used to build abstract designs.
The icon series pieces have one other thing in common, besides Gillespie use of language and text: each one is tall and rectangular, shaped like a door. In fact, they once were doors and Gillespie has salvaged them. It’s hard not to notice this in the museum’s gallery, where a half-dozen door-shaped pieces are hung with their bottom edges inches from the floor.
“That’s why I hung them low. I wanted them to feel like doorways that you could enter,” she says.
scott@anchoragepress.com
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