Mixed media collage on canvas 24h × 48w″ 2026 $1,800
Title after the traditional Appalachian folk song, discovered on YouTube while finishing the piece.
About the work
This piece began as a weak two-panel collage from 2016 — never photographed, never shown — that sat unresolved for nearly a decade. In 2026 it became the site of one of those studio struggles that a mentor once described perfectly: a painting is a battle that needs to be won. And when that battle is over, the viewer never sees the fight — only the luminous result.
Desert imagery was layered in — orange squares, earth-toned rock forms, turquoise, grocery ads, tissue, cheesecloth — along with two Southwestern square crosses traced from a wood cross on the studio wall, purchased in Arizona. An abstract figure was attempted but wasn't working. Teresa Gillespie, herself an accomplished printmaker, suggested replacing it with a Kouros — the classical Greek youth figure that appears throughout GJ's Ancient Echoes series. It was exactly the right call.
Bright white oil paint was applied over the surface, its luminosity creating a glowing undercoat. The Kouros was then outlined in tissue over the glowing ground. Waking half-asleep in the middle of the night, the solution to the final problem arrived suddenly — a thin line of white added across the figure's chest, a barely-there cross that instantly integrated the figure with the surrounding composition and brought the whole piece into resolution.
What makes the surface so alive is what lies beneath it. The original 2016 collage — its textures, its color fragments, its layered papers — shows through the white ground in ways that could never be planned or replicated. Earlier color marks bleed through, giving the figure a turquoise ghost-like presence. This is the collage equivalent of pentimento — the phenomenon seen in old master paintings where earlier compositions surface through later ones, adding depth, mystery, and a sense of time compressed into a single image. Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and de Kooning all worked this way. Here it happened by instinct.
The crosshatching from the original collage material read unexpectedly as grave-clothes — an unplanned echo of ancient burial ritual and resurrection imagery that the artist only recognized after the work was finished. The song title arrived from a YouTube feed playing in the studio. Some works arrive through planning. This one arrived through persistence, collaboration, and a willingness to listen to what the piece wanted to become.
Exhibition
- Modern Myth Making, City of Burien Gallery Program at Merrill Gardens, June 5 – September 24, 2026 (debut exhibition)
To purchase Contact GJ Gillespie at garjog@gmail.com
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| GJ Gillespie Artist |
Artist Statement
My work exists outside of time. Ancient Greek heroes emerge from supermarket circulars and consumer ephemera. Egyptian pharaohs are built from crossword puzzles. Mid-century abstract figures dissolve into Pacific Northwest landscapes layered with colored tissue and found paper.
Working in mixed-media collage from a 1928 Tudor Revival farmhouse on Whidbey Island, I stand on the shoulders of giants — riffing on cultural icons from Greek mythology, Pompeii frescoes, and the mid-century masters who transformed what painting could express: Arshile Gorky, the Northwest Mystics Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, and Kenneth Callahan.
Titles of each piece are drawn from rock and pop music, connecting ancient imagery with modern soundtracks.
While the themes may seem lofty, viewers will sense a playfulness in the work. Pompeii frescoes meet grocery ads. Ancient Greek busts emerge from fast food wrappers. When it comes to making art I follow the philosophy of Thoreau: the world is but a canvas to our imagination.
Biography
GJ Gillespie (b. 1955) lives and works in a 1928 Tudor Revival farmhouse on Whidbey Island, WA. His mixed-media collage practice draws on the Northwest Mystics, mid-century abstract expressionism, Greek and Roman mythology, and song titles from rock and pop music. He has completed six residencies at the UW Whiteley Center, Friday Harbor Labs. In addition to winning 19 awards, his work has appeared in 77 exhibitions and 214 journal publications.
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| GJ Gillespie Studio |
Gillespie Home overlooking Oak Harbor
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