ThomGillespie

I have doodled since I was a kid. I started with small figurines made out of glazier’s putty, dinosaurs out of clay, back of the comics drawings of Abraham Lincoln, a short stint at the Philadelphia College of Art on Saturdays doing still life pastels in grade school, school decorations for all holidays. In college I was told I had to take an art history class and when told that involved memorizing dates and art movements I asked: can I do something else? I was told: you could take art classes. So, I did: painting, sculpture and water color. My doodling moved to a new level with a minor obsession with the work of Joseph Cornell, Romare Bearden, Louise Nevelson, and Duchamp: assemblage, collage and silliness.

Years ago, I was in shows sponsored by The Philadelphia Museum of Art & Artform; the New Orleans Museum of Art; The Alaska State Museum. We wanted to travel ( Philly to New Orleans to the Arctic to Juneau AK to Berkeley, to Indonesia to Indiana) so I threw away years of painting, sculpture, and assemblage and eventually got the first 128 Macintosh because of the illustrations of Susan Kare on the Mac screen. At the same time, I started using digital tools I also started programming which lead to a PhD in Information studies at Berkeley and my doodling combined with programming and became digital or what I call D-oodling. Over the years I have used hundreds of digital tools for 2D and 3D design. Sometimes I assemble, sometimes I sketch, sometimes I collage and eventually I digitize and start cutting and layering and adjusting on my laptop until happy and then I send my work to a printer in Berlin to be printed on sheets of aluminum, a surface I very much like.

--Thom
Thom.gillespie@gmail.com
812 219 6784