Gregory Gillespie, 63, realism artist
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BELCHERTOWN, Mass. (AP) -- Gregory Gillespie, an artist known for an
obsessive attention to realistic detail, has died in an apparent
suicide. He was 63.
''He lost a lifelong battle with mental illness,'' his widow, the author
Peggy Gillespie, said Friday. ''He was suffering from post-retrospective
depression.''
She found her husband's body hanging in his studio late Wednesday night,
said Robert Fishko of the Forum Gallery, where the artist often
exhibited his work.
The retrospective, a traveling show of three decades' worth of
Gillespie's work, appeared at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge last fall.
His works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as Boston's Museum of Fine
Arts.
Gillespie, who was at the heart of the group of western Massachusetts
painters who became known as Valley Realists, studied art at New York's
Cooper Union in the 1950s, the apex of Abstract Expressionism.
Gillespie painted landscapes, street scenes, portraits, and sexual and
religious allegories in a shifting range of styles. Continuity was
provided by a sense of unflinching scrutiny that often gave his work a
disturbing edge.
04-29-00 / 19:14 EDT
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