Gillespie's Equestrian Art

By Colleen O'Reilly

Oringally Published in Gillespie: Retrospective

When encountering Dr. Charles Gillespie's racehorse portraits, one is immediately struck by the energy and the personality fo the subjects, and the level of precision in the rendering of details. The horses, drawn with colored pencil, are enormous, up to seven feet in size, but are composed entirely of tiny, sharp strokes of the pencil. They leap past or towards you, their muscled bodies and individual faces evoking the drama and intensity of the sport but also the beauty of the animals and the relationship between horse and jockey.

It turns out that this attention to detail, as well as the appreciation of the individuality, are the perfect ideas to focus on to understand Gillespie's career in general. In his life as an artist, a teacher, engineer, and even a political lobbyist, Gillespie has forged his own path. He has also embodied the idea hat creativity is an important value that transcends disciplines and professions - that artistic thinking can be healing on an individual level but is also essential on a societal level.

Gillespie has spent most of his life in Titusville, Florida, but was born in Bloomsburg and has strong family roots here. His grandmother and mother were both teachers trained at Bloomsburg Normal School/Bloomsburg Teacher's College and Gillespie identifies his becoming a teacher as continuing a family heritage. After completing a master's of educational eat University fo Florida, Gillespie taught college-level ceramics and published a manual on ceramics technique. However, discouraged by the instability of academic work, in 1980 he applied for a job at Rockwell International, the NASA contractor building he space shuttles. He ended up being hired to help design and install the ceramic tiles that were part of the shuttles' thermal protection system. His father had actually also been an engineer when Gillespie was growing up, working with the Apollo program on the lunar excursion module's hypergolic fuel systems. Gillespie worked at Rockwell International for two years, developing the technology that would protect the space shuttle upon re-entry, building kilns, improving the tiles, and figuring out how to bond the tiles sufficiently. While there, Gillespie also invented a tubular door seal that is now used in all home ovens.

In 1982, Gillespie left Rockwell International and went back to school to get a doctorate of education, planning to go back to teaching college courses. He returned to Bloomsburg during this time to do a residency in the Bloomsburg State College ceramics studio, where he created works that incorporated materials from the space shuttle technology. For Gillespie, the theme of experimentation bridged art and engineering, and was a key part of his educational philosophy. He completed his doctorate in 1984, with a dissertation titles "An Assessment of the Relationship between Design Knowledge and Aesthetic Principles," in which he argued for a specific method of teaching the appreciation of abstract art. In the meantime, NASA had launched the "Teacher in Space Project," which would involve including a teacher as a crew member on space flights in order to connect students and educational goals to space exploration. Setting his sights on qualifying for this, Gillespie started work as a K-12 art teacher.

While Gillespie never flew to space, he had found a new career, and a continued to engage with American space travel throughout his time as an art teacher. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he made trips to Washington D.C. to lobby congress to support manned space flight with the National Keep it Sold program (now known as Citizens for Space Exploration), emphasizing to lawmakers the many educational benefits of space travel. In the early 2000s, during the building of the International Space Station, he participated in summer programs at Boeing designed to provide opportunities for teachers to explore ideas from industry that might enhance their work with their students. In describing his experience in these programs, Gillespie talked about an idea hat he shared with engineers in one of their meetings: "you make extraordinary seem routine, whereas I've got to make routine stuff seem extraordinary."

You can read the rest of Dr. Charles Gillespie's story, written by Colleen O'Reilly, and his journey from art teacher to engineer to equine portrait artist in his book Gillespie:Retrospective available for purchase in the shop.