Dan Gillespie isn’t sure what he wants to be when he grows up.
He’s been accepted into excellent pre-master’s baccalaureate programs in art, but can’t decide between the University of Chicago’s Art Institute and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In fact, he’s not sure he’s even heading into the right discipline.
While finishing a painting and just two days removed from the opening of his senior art exhibit at Wabash, Gillespie admits that he might well have majored in the wrong subject. Art seems to be his calling, but music, he says, is his passion.
Welcome to the creative, expressive, and sometimes frustrated world of Wabash’s gifted senior artist Dan Gillespie.
"I’ve been in a state of conflict," he says, pulling back from a painting he started last fall but wants to tinker with before giving it to his parents. "I think recently I’ve enjoyed music more than art. Maybe because art—and getting ready for my senior show—has been so demanding."
If you attended Gillespie’s senior violin recital, you’d find it hard to believe he didn’t major in music. If you walked into the art gallery on the opening night of his senior show, you’d be blown away by his artistic talent and by his ability to recreate visual memories by juxtaposing childhood snapshots with vibrant colors on canvas.
So who is Dan Gillespie?
Born on an Army base in Virginia, Gillespie moved with his family around the world, literally, before settling in Naperville, Illinois. Along the way there were stops in the Arabic Islamic state Qatar and a few years in Copenhagen, Denmark. His family kept scrapbooks with photographs, which later stirred memories and became the foundation of Gillespie’s senior project.
He squeezes a bit more white paint and begins mixing it with a pale blue.
"I’ve traveled so much—lived all over —and I have all these memories in photographic form. So it made sense to bring that into my work. I used the photos as a starting point, then painted what I remember feeling about the place and time."
That experience, too, has been frustrating.
"I really want to move into other media, 3-D maybe, instead of trying to reproduce images," he says. "I’m also interested in the conceptual aspects of art, and it’s been frustrating to not be able to work that into my art."
Even four years at Wabash couldn’t tie him down. He spent a semester studying at the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy, and earned a prestigious internship at the Guggenheim Museum in Venice.
"I was one of just two men with 15 women, and I was the youngest intern in the group. It was amazing. We gave tours, sold tickets, stocked the store, and did outreach programs. And at night we had these amazing discussions on seminar topics."
If his artistic expression has tested his emotions, playing music—from Bach to bluegrass—has been his release, his constant. His expression brightens just to think of it.
"I’d really love to play music," he says. "Everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve been able to find people who enjoy playing music, and I’ve made my best friends when I’ve been around music people; it’s easy for me to connect with them. It lights me up; I have a blast around people like that."
Which also explains his frustrations during his time at Wabash.
"Collaboration drives me," he says, laying the paintbrush down as he becomes more visually animated. "If you’re interested in art or music, it helps to be around other people who are excited and interested in it; it breeds excitement and competition. And at Wabash, I just don’t have a lot of peers. It would be great to be in a quartet or a chamber orchestra, but there just aren’t enough students.
"I really feel like the College could do a better job recruiting creative, artistic students. This place can be lonely for an artist."
Gillespie has discovered, though, that artists do tend to find each other. He’s built an "unbelievable friendship" with Professor Kay Widdows. The professor of economics is also a talented pianist.
"We started with a Beethoven sonata," he explains, "and we’ve continued to get together to play, go out to dinner, and go to concerts. Our relationship started out with music, but we’ve become good friends. She knows so much more about art and music than I do, but even more, she’s been a great teacher of life for me."
Gillespie and his Phi Kappa Psi fraternity brother Nick Roudebush ’09, a guitarist, play acoustic bluegrass music at local coffee shops and restaurants.
"I’ve made the local connections with the community that most Wabash students never do," he says. "Like everywhere else I’ve lived, I’ve been able to meet a lot of great musicians and artists who just like to be together.
"But I’ve had to work at it; I’ve had to seek it out, which has at its been frustrating."