Jean Gillespie is an artist and printmaker living and working in Kirkliston. Born in 1951, Jean graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2001 with a BA (Hons) in Painting. She completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Drawing in 2003 from the Wimbeldon School of Art, London.
Jean's style could be described as abstract, her favoured subject matter of water and edgelands seems to drift somewhere between recognisable subject and total abstraction. Water, by it's very nature is fluid, shape shifting, fractured and fragmented by the play of light or dark shadows lurking beneath the surface. Jean uses unique printing methods to achieve the feeling of water, building up mutiple translucent layers in her artwork. She uses a kind of glue called gum arabic, which is first spread over a plastic plate. This holds the water based printing medium in place and allows it to dry into the paper before Jean applies a second oil-based etching plate over the first water based print.
Jean also paints in a much more figurative style, we have a selection of her life studies completed in oils in the gallery as part of our curent exhibtion.
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