Sarah Gillespie lives in Devon, England and works full-time as a painter, typically making tiny oil sketches outside in the summer months, and then very large studio canvases and charcoals in the winter. As a student, she studied 16th and 17th century techniques at the Atelier Neo-Medici in Paris. Today, Gillespie adheres to the simple truths that make landscape a perennially significant art form: above all, attentiveness to the nature of the world we live in and the place it will always occupy in the poetic imagination.
. The steadiness and intensity of gaze in Sarah Gillespie's paintings reveal an intuitive understanding; she appears to have developed her vision quietly and steadily—the fragility and beauty of nature fuse with a strong feeling for a specific 'place' and a willingness to be still and contemplative before it. Sarah’s pictures are imbued with a love of poetry, as she both seeks out the poetry in the world around her and also makes references to the works of romantic poets from Keats and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Kathleen Raine and Mary Oliver. Like them she sees the eternal hand of the divine in our landscape, in the delicate balance of nature, in the ‘connectedness’ of the ecosystem, and in the cycle of the changing seasons and annual repetition that give each place a particular history and resonance.
A coastal scene, Sunyata is painted with a unique intensity. Through this intensity, Sarah has found expression for a range of moods that encompass the whole human condition—awe, grief, anger, and joy are all represented here in haunting forms. These are the emotions that inspired the work and they are expressed metaphorically and spiritually, directly and indirectly in her works: her awe at the beauty of the natural world touched by the hand of the divine; her anger at the willful destruction of our planet and its resources; her grief in the form of a wave crashing against rocks; and her joy and exhilaration as sunlight bursts through the branches of a willow tree. Sunyata was directly inspired by lines from Keats’ “When I have Fears:”
Then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink
Gillespie interprets: “for me, he is describing the spiritual emptiness, rather like the Buddhist idea of ‘sunyata’, the relief in forgetting our small selves that we can find in meditation on the sea. Not something that can easily be put into words; best leave it to Keats.” Buddhist doctrine holds that Sunyata is the idea of emptiness, or the concept that nothing has a self, soul, or essence, and that the world is made up of a stream of ever-changing mental and physical phenomena. Crucial to the Sunyata doctrine is the notion that the world is made up of a stream of ever changing elements, dharmas. Rather than seeing these dharmas, we create concepts which approximate what is really there. The world as we see it, therefore, is ultimately illusory—a fabrication of mind. The world of conventional truth is a world of appearances; the world of ultimate truth is Sunyata.
Sarah Gillespie lives in Devon, England and works full-time as a painter, typically making tiny oil sketches outside in the summer months, and then very large studio canvases and charcoals in the winter. As a student, she studied 16th and 17th century techniques at the Atelier Neo-Medici in Paris. Today, Gillespie adheres to the simple truths that make landscape a perennially significant art form: above all, attentiveness to the nature of the world we live in and the place it will always occupy in the poetic imagination. The steadiness and intensity of gaze in Sarah Gillespie's paintings reveal an intuitive understanding; she appears to have developed her vision quietly and steadily—the fragility and beauty of nature fuse with a strong feeling for a specific 'place' and a willingness to be still and contemplative before it. Sarah’s pictures are imbued with a love of poetry, as she both seeks out the poetry in the world around her and also makes references to the works of romantic poets from Keats and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Kathleen Raine and Mary Oliver. Like them she sees the eternal hand of the divine in our landscape, in the delicate balance of nature, in the ‘connectedness’ of the ecosystem, and in the cycle of the changing seasons and annual repetition that give each place a particular history and resonance.
Greenwich Gallery, Greenwich, Connecticut
Waterhouse & Dodd, New York, NY (label verso)
Private Collection, Greenwich, Connecticut
