Turning chaos into art: New documentary tracing life of acclaimed painter Gregory Gillespie previews at Academy of Music

"Robin (Freedenfeld)” by Gregory Gillespie, 1993. CONTRIBUTED

Gregory Gillespie in the 1990s.

Gregory Gillespie in the 1990s. CONTRIBUTED

Gregory Gillespie in the late 1980s.

Gregory Gillespie in the late 1980s. CONTRIBUTED

Gregory Gillespie in the early 1990s.

Gregory Gillespie in the early 1990s. CONTRIBUTED

"Self Portrait II" by Gregory Gillespie, 1977. CONTRIBUTED

GREGORY GILLESPIE

GREGORY GILLESPIE CONTRIBUTED

Gregory Gillespie in the late 1990s.

Gregory Gillespie in the late 1990s. CONTRIBUTED

”Red Squash” by Gregory Gillespie, 1974.

”Red Squash” by Gregory Gillespie, 1974. CONTRIBUTED

By CAROLYN BROWN

Staff Writer

Published: 10-04-2024 2:27 PM

Modified: 10-10-2024 3:56 PM


A New England filmmaker will make his directorial debut later this month with a film about a local painter known for his unique style.

Evan Goodchild, a Connecticut-based director originally from Springfield, will hold a sneak preview of “The Painted Life of Gregory Gillespie,” a feature-length documentary profiling the late artist, on Sunday, Oct. 27, from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Academy of Music. Admission is free.

Gillespie, who moved to western Massachusetts in the early 1970s, was known for creating visceral works in a style that often gets described as “magic realism.” Many of his paintings are self-portraits, featuring not-quite-photorealistic faces with tough or uncomfortable expressions. Others combine a random assortment of objects and figures within an empty space.

His works often involved the inclusion of multimedia elements, as part of a technique he called “rorschaching,” and he was fond of taking razor blades to his canvases. (As he wrote in a journal entry in 1995: “Razor-blading, for me, is a way to open the painting up, so I can get into it. It destroys the surface, yesterday’s marks, yesterday’s assumptions. Things pop up from the distant past, things get rubbed off and slowly disappear.”)

A 2015 article in Hyperallergic said that Gillespie’s art is “like a pool of bright green antifreeze in a forest glade, something aberrant, lurid, and toxic, equal parts repellent and mesmerizing. It is also something that you can’t stop thinking about, at least not very easily.”

Likewise, art critic Alexi Worth wrote in a 1999 Art New England profile that Gillespie’s works “have always veered between diffusion and concentration, between zany phantasmagoria, and a kind of obsessive trompe l’oeil realism. One minute he’s painting sexualized homunculi, like a truant school kid carving pornographic fantasies into his desk. The next minute he’s transforming something real and ordinary — a summer squash, a broom, a hammer-into a hypnotically vivid, sacramental object.” (Worth was also interviewed for the documentary.)

Director Evan Goodchild admitted that when he first discovered Gillespie’s work, he wasn’t a fan, much like when he first heard Bob Dylan’s voice. But Gillespie’s work, like Dylan’s, leaves a lasting impression nonetheless.

“I think that’s the power of this guy,” he said. “There’s something grating, there’s something challenging about it — but he wins you over.”

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Gillespie’s difficult childhood impacted his work as an adult: His father was an alcoholic and his mother was institutionalized when he was only 5 years old. He grew up in the Catholic Church, which he resented for the ways in which church leaders would try to scare children with threats of hellfire. Naturally, dark themes often show up in his paintings, and many feature nudity or mutilated body parts.

In a 1999 work, “Baptism,” colored in a sickly green and yellow palette, a man dunks a naked child headfirst into what looks like a sink or toilet as a woman looks on in horror nearby; in “Seated Figure,” a pallid individual sits in solitude in a dark space, wearing an ambiguous and almost absent-minded expression while looking off into an uncertain distance.

In his interview with Alexi Worth, Gillespie said, “My job is to turn the chaos and pain into art.” Even so, Goodchild pointed out, making assumptions about Gillespie’s personality from his paintings — ‘“Oh, this is a really tough, mean dude’” — would be inaccurate: “He wasn’t [mean]. He was very humorous and buoyant and beloved by his community.”

Gillespie, who was born in New Jersey, spent seven years in Italy painting as part of a fellowship before moving to western Massachusetts in the early 1970s. He became part of a group dubbed the “Valley Realists,” which also included Robin Freedenfeld, Scott Prior, Randall Deihl and Jane Lund, all of whom were interviewed for the film.

When Gillespie was 41, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. honored him with a lifetime retrospective, which was atypical for an artist that age. (A Washington Post article about the show began: “Gregory who?”) Currently, his paintings are part of a number of museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, among others.

When Gillespie died by suicide in his early 60s, he got an obituary in The New York Times, which said that his “probing, urgent, often bizarre paintings occupied a singular place in the history of late-20th-century representation.”

Gillespie left behind 118 journals, which Goodchild and his production team drew from, in addition to studio footage and interviews with Gillespie and his contemporaries, to make the film over the course of the three years.

After the film screening at the Academy of Music, Goodchild will join movie participants for a panel discussion. He said that attendees who want to learn more about the artist after the event may find themselves at the beginning of a fascinating rabbit hole.

“If you want to keep digging into Gillespie,” Goodchild said, “I warn you — you will  just keep going.”