One Track Mind: The Art of Bob Gillespie

Bob Gillespie - Artist for Glen Speed

After studying Engineering at Clarkson College and Art at SUNY Potsdam, Robert Gillespie earned his Master of Arts Degree from S.U.N.Y Oswego in 1975. He has been a career art instructor and fine arts painter artist in the Finger Lakes area of New York State since 1972.

Contact: Bob Gillespie at rgillesp@roadrunner.com | 315-694-2812 | Visit Online!

  

• Last time we got together we were chatting about the genesis of the GGP and in that episode you mentioned some of your personal background, but this time we’re going to take a deeper dive into Bob Gillespie the artist, rather than Bob the environmentalist 😉 
• Which came first, the artist or the petrol-head?
• There’s so many facets to Art and Painting – How did you decide to pair the two together? What was the inspiration? Was it a race/event, a car, a photograph you saw?  
• There’s all sorts of different styles of Art – what’s your chosen style/medium, and why?
• Let’s talk about the Murals you’ve painted, you’re a large part of the Watkins Glen community. Why large murals? Which was the first (and why?) Talk a little about the latest one (also the cover of the book) found at the Chamber of Commerce 
• What inspired you to publish a book about your art? What was that process like?
• There’s a new trend of “photo realistic” paintings popping up all over social media; what are your thoughts on these types of pieces? 
• Acquiring Bob Gillespie art. Do you work on custom commissions? Where can someone purchase one of your pieces? 
• What’s next for Bob Gillespie? Upcoming pieces, projects or collaborations you can share? Events you’re going to be at in 2025 where people could see you work, or meet you?

and much, much more!

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] BreakFix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the autosphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads that wonder what’s How did they get that job or become that person?

The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.

Crew Chief Eric: For our guest, there has always been a joy to drawing and painting. His conscious ego fades into almost selfless, relaxed concentration. Time dissolves and the decisions become intuitive and not reasoned. Kurt Vonnegut put it like this, to practice any art, how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow.

So do it. And with that, Bob Gillespie considers himself very fortunate to have witnessed more than his fair share of history at the racetrack. He never thought his childhood heroes would someday have his art hanging on their walls. [00:01:00] And he’s here to share his story and how he got the chance to honor them while exploring ways to capture their sport in paint.

And with that, let’s welcome Bob back to the show. It’s a break fix. Hello, Eric. Hey, Bob. So the last time we got together, you were here chatting about the genesis of the Green Grand Prix. And in that episode, you mentioned some of your personal background, but this time we’re going to take a deeper dive into the who, what, when, and where of Bob Gillespie, the artist rather than Bob, the environmentalist.

So let’s start off talking about how all this came to be, which came first, the artist or the petrol head?

Bob Gillespie: I would say both of them came first at the age of about five years old. My dad was a pilot and I was crazy about airplanes. And then when I went to my, uh, first Watkins Glen race, All my airplane drawings switched to, uh, D jaguars and lotuses and all kinds of exotically shaped, streamlined, [00:02:00] rolling sculptures that reminded me of airplanes.

They were fast. All that excitement was something that just was already growing in me and already nurtured by my dad. I wanted to design cars. Dad was an aeronautical engineer. He came home from World War II, finished his degree and took over the family milk business, but he was a born engineer. He wanted his sons to be interested in all kinds of mechanical things.

And I was supposedly the smartest, one of the four brothers. I don’t know how true that is, but I wanted to design cars and I guess that was good enough. And so, um, I. Decided, Hey, I want to apply to General Motors Fisher Body Institute. Well, I had an interview and I was rejected and I thought, Oh, well, my fallback is mechanical engineering.

So I studied mechanical engineering for three years, took the calculus, took the physics, all the numbers, all the formulas and all [00:03:00] that, and realized, Hey. I thought I wanted to draw cars, and there was nobody there that was designing cars. Well, what do I really like to do? I like to draw, so I took one course at Potsdam State, which was just down the street from Clarkson College in the north country of New York State, and I knew I had to switch.

All my credits, surprisingly, were transferable. I majored in art and photography, got my degree in art. For two years, went back and got my master’s degree in fine arts, painting and photography at Oswego state college in upstate New York. But I had always drawn cars. I’ve done a lot of abstract paintings.

I’ve done many other kinds of artwork. But my love was always cars. I just kept coming back to that. I was fortunate to get a job just 30 miles up the road from Watkins Glen. And we went to the races every chance I could. I took photographs. I did drawings from my photographs. Started doing [00:04:00] paintings, then the research center in Watkins Glen started up in 1998.

That was five years before I retired from teaching. And I thought, well, if I’m ever going to really jump into this, now’s the time to do it. So, I met a lot of people at Watkins Glen. Cameron Argettsinger, Bill Green, the historian, a number of the original drivers that were still around. They started saying, well, when are you going to do a painting of me?

And so I said, get in line. This is going to be fun. I’ve done about 130 paintings of the races at Watkins Glen and some other locations too, but primarily American road racing and Watkins Glen history.

Crew Chief Eric: When was your first. First race, because there’s three different versions of Watkins Glen. And in your book, you reflect a lot on the early, early days, the road course around the gorge.

And then you talk about Watkins Glen, the interim circuit, and then we have the Grand Prix circuit. So when did you get your first taste of the Glen? Was it in those early street racing days?

Bob Gillespie: No, I [00:05:00] missed those. I saw my first race in 1960. It was the year before the first United States Grand Prix at Watkins Glen.

It was a Formula Libra. And so we had D Type Jaguars, Sterling Moss, and Rob Walker’s Formula One Lotus 18, I think it was. There were Cooper Climax, Jack Brabham was there. It was a mixed bag of cars, and it was so exciting because it was such a variety of cars. And the sounds were incredible. And the smells, because some of them were burning alcohol.

It was amazing. I was 11 years old. And that’s a perfect age for a kid to get hooked on cars. And it was just a few months after I had seen the epic movie Ben Hur, in which there was a very exciting chariot race. My brothers and I were crazy about chariot races. We had horses. And so, you know, a four horse hitch on a Roman chariot, [00:06:00] that was just such a wonderful movie.

When I went to Watkins Glen, here was what I saw as a Roman amphitheater with a modern chariot race, with entries from all over the world. All kinds of names that I couldn’t pronounce. It was very exciting.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s a lot of facets to art and to painting, and you studied a lot of different things and probably took inspiration from some of the masters.

And in the book, you mentioned all the paintings are acrylic, unless you otherwise stated that they weren’t. Why did you choose that as your medium? You know, versus oils versus water versus this. And there’s a lot of pen and ink and charcoal preliminary sketches that gets you to your paintings. So how did you develop your style?

How did you choose your artistic style?

Bob Gillespie: I had done a lot of oil paintings. Oil painting is a ritual because the paint has to dry. The colors are beautiful. They’re very vibrant. They’re glossy, but it’s a slow process. Acrylic, I could paint fast, and I [00:07:00] like to paint fast. If I goofed up, I could wait five minutes, let it dry, and put on another coat of paint and fix it up.

If I made a mistake in an oil painting, I had to sit there and wait and look at the darn thing for too long before I could paint over it or change it. The technology of paint has really changed a lot, but I do enjoy oil painting, but I just like to paint fast.

Crew Chief Eric: Considering some of the larger scale paintings that you do, like your murals, that would make sense that you want to do them as quickly as possible.

I couldn’t see doing the side of a building in oil paint.

Bob Gillespie: No, no. And another reason why you should never do that in oil paint is because oil paint will not flex like acrylic or latex paint. Acrylic or latex. It can take humidity changes much better. It can take temperature changes better. So with a mural, you really have to work with water based paints.

But yeah, for smaller paintings, I’d love to [00:08:00] try some oil paintings again, you know, get back into it. I’ve done a combination of acrylic and oils. Both. I’ve done a lot of airbrush also. I love airbrush, but I just keep gravitating back to acrylics. I’m just so used to them. You paint with what you’re familiar with, and the only trick of acrylic paints is they dry a little darker than they look when they’re wet.

And so you have to have that in mind all the time.

Crew Chief Eric: Reminds me of some of the other artists that we’ve had on the show. For instance, Lynn Heiner, you know, she falls back to her paint knives. That’s what she’s known for. And that’s what she got used to doing. It was something different pinstripe, Chris Dunlop.

He came from the auto body world and he does a lot of these one time passes, a lot of airbrushing, because he comes from the body shop industry originally. So to your point, you kind of fall back on what you got good at. And that’s your go to, right? In terms of style.

Bob Gillespie: Yes. There’s something about working with thick paint.

Just the physical nature of the paint itself and [00:09:00] just pushing it on a canvas or on a board. There’s some kind of therapy in there that’s a lot different than using an airbrush and these fine mists, you know.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s talk a little bit more about the murals that you’ve created. If any of the listeners have had the opportunity or will get the opportunity to go to Watkins Glen, It doesn’t take much to run into a Bob Gillespie mural downtown, either on the side of the building, inside the Chamber of Commerce, all over the place.

How did you get into doing these large scale paintings, the murals that you see? The

Bob Gillespie: first mural I did, when I was in third grade, my art teacher invited me, and there were three or four other kids doing that too, to paint a window in the downtown area where I grew up, which was Fulton, New York, and it was right next to the theater.

And it was Christmas time, and so we were painting snowflakes, and I just really enjoyed working big. My next experience was in college, a hamburger place. It wasn’t [00:10:00] McDonald’s. It was before McDonald’s. There’s outlets called Carroll’s Hamburgers, at least in the Northeast. While I was at Potsdam State working as a painting major, I was invited to do a mural.

In fact, it was a history mural to put up in a hamburger place at fast food, which is only in a college town. I guess you get a job like that, but I enjoyed that. I’ve always loved history. I mean, that’s a big part of it. I love history. All aspects of it. These murals that I did all involve specific moments in history, and I try to capture them as accurately as I can.

Crew Chief Eric: So let’s talk about your latest one, which can be seen right now if you go to the Watkins Glen Chamber of Commerce right downtown on Franklin Street, and it’s also the bottom half of the cover of your book, One Track Mind. So tell us about how you put it together. Why you were commissioned to do it.

What’s it all about? What’s the story trying to tell?

Bob Gillespie: The story is trying to tell Denver Cornets [00:11:00] story. He told us to many people about how the only time he had polled position in a race was in the 1952 queen Catherine cup, they drew straws. And that’s how I got the pole position. Actually, it was a Le Mans start.

They had to run across the road, hop in the cars and go. Denver was the first car. The trouble was Bill Spear had the means to buy a real brand new Asuka, which in 1952 was, was just sensational. It had 1500 CC displacement. This race was for one and a half liter cars or less. Bill Spear, Drew, I don’t know.

Fourth or fifth place. Denver told me that he pulled out, he led the race through the first two turns, and then Bill Spear passed him. Like he was pasted on the guardrail is what Denver said. He wanted me to do the start of that race because I could show him in the lead, but you see Bill [00:12:00] Spear in the Oscar kind of looming up behind him.

There’s a real narrative element to that painting. And you can see that many of these cars. Race with license plates on them. They were driven to the track, but Bill Spear had this brand new Oscar and he just ran away with this race, but I thought it was a dramatic scene. If I could put the viewer right in the middle of the road and in a mural.

That would be nice because, uh, you know, it’s kind of intimidating

Crew Chief Eric: for sure. And having seen it in person, I mean, it’s so big and the perspective, the cars almost seem like they’re going to run you over there that lifelike. And they’re that big. And you’re like, man, they’re just coming right at you. Almost jumping off the wall with something as large as the mural that’s at the chamber of commerce.

How long did that take to create?

Bob Gillespie: It actually took 12 weeks. But I had to commute. I would work three or four days a week, maybe six hours, seven hours. [00:13:00] And I took two weeks off, but there was a lot of setup and teardown because I couldn’t leave everything out because they opened early and sometimes stayed open late.

So I had to clean up my paint, put my equipment away. So yeah, that set up and tear down was a kind of a pain, but it was actually, that whole experience was wonderful because I met people from all over the world. They have thousands of people come in during the summer from all kinds of distant places. I made an effort to talk to anyone that would say hi or just say hello.

Gee, that looks nice, you know, asked him where they were from and just started up a little conversation. So that took a while also.

Crew Chief Eric: When we were there together looking at it, you had mentioned that there was a lot of issues you had with lighting doing a mural that large inside of the building. You needed it really, really dark.

Bob Gillespie: Yes, because they didn’t want me working in there at night. If they had given me a key to the place, [00:14:00] it would have been a lot easier. I was working from a sketch the fastest way to do it. There’s really two ways you can grid a wall out and scale your sketch with the same grid. Scale it up to a wall, or you can project it on the wall, or you can do both, which I did.

And so I had to get it dark in the uh, chamber of Commerce in the middle of the day, and I would have them turn off the lights. I would hang sheets or drop cloths, whatever I could find, to block out all the windows, so that I could take my Kodak carousel projector. It’s hard to find slide film anymore, so I’ve got a slide mount machine, so I took negatives of print film, put them in slide mounts, and I had the image divided up into nine sections, and so I could project them up on a grid, one by one, Paint each one and then key the next projection off that and trace the basic lines so I could grow [00:15:00] the image that way.

The disadvantage for the Chamber of Commerce was it looked like it was closed in the middle of the day when they’re in peak tourist season.

Crew Chief Eric: You make it sound so simple, but I guarantee it’s more complicated than we realize. What a feat of engineering in a way. To take your drawing that you probably did on an eight and a half by 11 and scale it up to something that’s 40 by

Bob Gillespie: 20.

You have to decide on the major lines. There’s no way that’s a very complex image and you have to just figure which lines are the most important and which ones you can just fill in. It is tricky. At least you’ve got the basic perspective, right? Positions of things so that they’re the same size, but it helps.

I’ve done about 20 murals. That also helps. It all takes practice.

Crew Chief Eric: As you’ve been going through all these different paintings, you mentioned over a hundred, I counted in the book, 84 paintings alone, just in the painting section, how did you choose what you were going [00:16:00] to do next? Was it just, you had a queue of people like a deli counter going, I’m number you know, 92 now serving 92, you know, the next one in line, or did you just paint what you wanted?

Bob Gillespie: Some of them were requested by people. Some of them were my own ideas. Many of them originated in stories that I just wanted to experience myself in a visual form, and I wanted to compose a scene in a way that was plausible, that captured the excitement, because there’s a lot of photography. Some is excellent, but not all.

You can paint from a perspective that you can’t photograph from. In other words, you can’t stand in the middle of the road during a race and take a photograph. I can stand in the middle of the road as a painter and paint those cars coming right at me. You know, one exciting aspect that you can use to get attention is you put the spectator, the viewer of the painting, in a position of danger.

You know, uh, that [00:17:00] definitely gets their attention. You know, these cars are coming right at you,

Crew Chief Eric: but there’s several of your paintings that you even mentioned that as you’re describing them, you know, the police officer shooing people off the bridge and you’re off to the side as the cameraman, or, you know, There’s the one shot of the cars coming up the S’s in the early days of the third generation of the track, what we know now to be the Grand Prix track.

It feels like the car is just leaping out of the page in your direction. Another one is that swooping downhill turn at, you know, 100 plus miles an hour. It just gives you this rush, even though everything’s completely static, but you get this feeling of how fast the driver is going down along the gorge down that hill.

What an incredible job.

Bob Gillespie: A lot of that is derived from photography where you can pan with your subject, follow the car, the car is going to be in focus, but the background is going to be smeared out. You have to know how much to smear the background. If you totally just make it a bunch of horizontal lines, it’s going to be boring.

You still have to [00:18:00] maintain some recognizability of that background, you know, so that people understand where it is. It just makes it more exciting, I think. It’s always a challenge to try to find different ways of capturing motion in paint.

Crew Chief Eric: Before we transition to talking a little bit more about the book, which we kind of are walking backwards into the big question of why’d you write the book, but we’ll get to that.

I got a pit stop question I got to ask you, Bob. We love asking artists and photographers this question, which is, The most beautiful or the sexiest car of all time, in your opinion. Is it that 930 Cabriolet that’s on the back cover of the book or is it something else?

Bob Gillespie: No, you know what I’m always drawn to is the Ferrari 250 GT short wheelbase.

Not the GTO that followed it. I remember my father had a sports car graphic magazine. It was before it was car driver. Maybe it was road and track. I can’t remember. But they had this, when the GT category was introduced, and I think it was [00:19:00] 1960, 61, somewhere in there, they had these, Cars that were GTs and they had a 250 GT short wheelbase, and I just thought that was the most gorgeous thing, and I’ve never changed my mind.

It’s just this, for me, this classic shape, and it has something to do with the proportion of it.

Crew Chief Eric: So do you believe that? The wives tale, if you want to call it that, that at that same time that that car was being developed, that Enzo turned around and said that the E Type Jag was the most beautiful car in the world.

Bob Gillespie: No, I don’t believe that myth. No, I hope he never said that. A car has to look fierce, you know, and that, that was Enzo’s attitude. I mean, who knows, maybe he said it, but I was at the New York auto show at the debut of the XKE Jag. My dad took me and my four brothers. To the New York auto show and let’s see that that had to be 1961.

I think the E type was introduced and they had it. So they had the XK E there, but then they had a C type and a D [00:20:00] Jag. And we could walk up close to those and examine all of it. It was wonderful. I love Jaguars also. I mean, there’s a lot of cars, but there’s just, Something classic that just never changes about that 250 GT.

Crew Chief Eric: So the inverse of that would be pretty obvious. The ugliest car of all time. Is there one that gets under your skin? Or as an artist, do you find the beauty in, in all designs?

Bob Gillespie: I hated the AMC. Was it a Gremlin? What was the bubble?

Crew Chief Eric: The Pacer. Pacer.

Bob Gillespie: Is that the

Crew Chief Eric: Pacer? The one that inspired the 928. Allegedly,

Bob Gillespie: that car is way too big for the shape of it.

If that was a micro car, it might work, but it did not work.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, you’re right, Bob. It didn’t work on multiple levels, but there’s cult followings for everything.

Bob Gillespie: That’s true. And my neighbor had one, so I had to look at that thing.

Crew Chief Eric: So [00:21:00] let’s switch gears. Let’s talk about your book, One Track Mind. As you said, you’re a student of history and of art and a motorsports enthusiast through and through. You’ve been hooked since day one. And as you said, your paintings are this chronology, they’re telling a story of time past and of races gone and people, you know, drivers you met, there’s a whole ethos to one track mind.

When you read the book cover to cover, you realize you’re telling not just your life story, but the life story of others and people that you’ve met along the way. And so I wondered, you know, as an artist, And a photographer, what made you decide to just say, you know what, I’m going to write a book and not only just write a book, but you’re self publishing this book.

So you’re doing a lot more of the work that let’s say other people would farm out. So to take on this challenge at this point, why

Bob Gillespie: I wanted to do it myself because I wanted it to be in my own words. And I was frustrated that my three favorite painting instructors That I had in undergraduate school and grad school never wrote [00:22:00] a book.

They never wrote much about what they did and why they did it. And when my favorite one, his name is George D. Green. He had one man shows in New York City, paintings and art museums throughout the country. When he passed away, I wrote something, the funeral home, you could write notes. And so I wrote something.

I got a phone call from his widow, from his wife. And she wanted to know about him, and I told stories of how he nurtured me and my attitudes towards art. And she said, well, you know, George just spent all this time in the studio and never wrote much about what he did and why he did it. And I showed her some of my artwork, corresponded back and forth.

She was on the West Coast. She said, well, I want you to write a book. So she inspired me. And then this other patron of mine was also a book publisher. He wanted to do a book about my artwork, but I told him, I guess I’m a control freak. I kept putting him off because I knew if there was going to [00:23:00] be a book, I wanted it to be in my own words.

And my dad had written his memoirs. And that was part of it too, just for the family. He never published it. I always enjoyed selling things too, because my family was in the milk business. As soon as I could ride a bike, I was sitting around knocking on doors on a Saturday morning, collecting milk bills. I was nervous as hell, but you got over it and pretty soon you enjoyed collecting money from people, you know, hey.

And I thought, well, if I write it and sell it myself, Then I cut out the middleman and I had always worked with a printer for my calendars that I did. And I was very satisfied with their work. I didn’t know that they could print a book, but I mentioned it to them and they said, yeah, yeah, we can do that.

So we started talking and it was affordable for me. And now I’m in my second printing. It’s just the way I was born. Brought up, I think, added into that whole thing of self-publishing.

Crew Chief Eric: The way the book [00:24:00] is designed, if you saw it sitting on my coffee table or yours, you go, man, that’s a gorgeous coffee table book.

And you can kind of thumb through it and get the idea of what’s in there, right? The large portion of your art collection, not all of your art, it focuses specifically on motorsport and cars and racing and all those kinds of things. But if I was gonna say, you know, you need to read Bob’s book. Are there particular paintings or sections of the book that you would say really hone in on this, something that is very touching for you?

Like, we’re all going to have different interpretations of it, but Bob, in your own words, what should we be focusing in on? Is there a particular portion of it?

Bob Gillespie: I think you should be focusing in on how artwork that’s exciting keeps a person young. For me, painting these pictures and viewing these paintings Keeps the child in me alive.

Yes. I’m a landscape painter that happens to put cars as exciting focal points. I love landscape painting, but I need something besides just scenic qualities. I need that excitement. It’s the same reason that I [00:25:00] go to automobile races. It’s pretty basic when it comes to noise. Smells, sights. It’s a spectacle.

Painting a spectacle of road racing keeps my mind in that awake stage. For me, it’s a perfect vehicle for me to keep that childhood excitement that I had when I was 11 years old watching those Dee Jaguars and then Sterling Mawson and stuff. Formula One and it’s my way of keeping that experience with me.

The act of painting it is exciting.

Crew Chief Eric: If you read the entire thing and you really analyze the paintings that are there, if they had been laid out in sequential order, you could almost flip through and turn by turn go through the track, whether it was the first generation, second generation or third generation of Watkins Glen.

And so what I took away from it and I sort of wondered was Bob painted it. a scene on almost every turn, straight away chicane that exists or existed. But what’s his favorite? Like I couldn’t hone in on, okay, [00:26:00] he’s done this turn so many times. That must be his favorite vantage point on the track. That’s where he likes to watch at Watkins Glen.

So what is that for you?

Bob Gillespie: On the original track, 6. 6 mile round the gorge circuit. My favorite spot is right after they come into town around that flat iron building, that brick one with the French mansard roof. They came down this steep hill. They came screaming into town and then around that left hand turn and then had to break and turn on to market street.

My favorite scene is looking up 4th Street, which is that street where they turn on to Franklin Street from seeing the cars just after they’ve come down the hill and around that flat iron building seems to have all the ingredients I really like and it’s architecture, it’s cars and it’s trees and it’s people all in close proximity.

On the, uh, present Grand Prix [00:27:00] circuit, one favorite spot I’ve got is Turn 8, which it’s the heel of the boot. They come around, and then they go up the little hill, and then around the slowest turn back onto the NASCAR track. The reason I like that turn is because you can stand there, and I think I put this in a book.

There’s hardly anybody there. It’s like the cars are putting on a show just for me. They come in from my left. They go right in front of me. I can watch how they exit the turn, and then I can watch them go up around that slow turn. It’s almost like a carousel turn, and you can stand right in the middle of it.

And there’s no huge fence. That’s what I like about it too.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, one of the coolest pieces of trivia that I took away from the book is sort of in that middle section of paintings when you start talking about Briggs Cunningham, the Cunningham team, racing at Le Mans, racing at the Glen, the Cobras, the C4Rs, and you mention the That one of those Cunningham paintings that you were commissioned to make was actually used in [00:28:00] the cover of Burt Levy’s book, The Last Open Road.

I said, wow, what an honor. What a little known fact. Bob Gillespie’s art is on the cover of this really famous book. How did that make you feel to be involved in that?

Bob Gillespie: Oh, it was a huge breakthrough. Just that Cunningham’s at Stonebridge painting was a real game changer for me. And that, I think I painted that in 1998.

Right when the Motor Racing Research Center was starting up, I sold a gazillion prints of it. The Cunningham people came up to me and said, hey, we’re making some reproductions, can we use that on our promotional materials? And then Bert came up and wanted to put it on his book. I had somebody tell me the other day, wait a minute, that’s not on the book.

And I said, well, it’s on the jacket that was on the book. He didn’t print the ink on the hardcover itself, it’s on the jacket. It’s on the jacket. But yeah, that, that was a big deal and it was a real honor. It was a recognition thing that was humbling, really. I never sold that painting. That painting is [00:29:00] hanging in our living room.

I’ll never sell it.

Crew Chief Eric: You got a copy of the last open road. You need two signatures now, two autographs on there. You need Bert’s and Bob’s on that thing to make it look right.

Bob Gillespie: That’s right.

Crew Chief Eric: Going back and talking about art styles for a moment, one of the other things that I learned from reading the book and learning about your past and how you came up through art and became an art teacher and all that is you mentioned the early days of photorealism, which has really taken to new artists.

Now you see a ton of photorealistic paintings popping up. All over the place on social media and on the internet thinking about Samantha Zimmerman and Chris Dunlop and Manu Kampart and all these guys that you look at these things and you’re like, is that a photo or is that a painting? Especially when you’re far away from it, you realize once you zoom in, it’s not a poster, it’s been painted.

Why such a draw into this high resolution type of painting? Is it something that you would teach in class? Is that one of the skills that you’d pass on to folks?

Bob Gillespie: I view photo realism [00:30:00] as a technical exercise. You’re copying a photograph. A lot of people that do photorealism use three colors like the, uh, you know, cyan, magenta, yellow, and they mix them so they can reproduce the colors just like a photograph.

Why are people drawn to that? I think it’s just because of the magic of photorealism. Creating an illusion on a two dimensional surface, you can kind of make it disappear like a photograph. Our lives are surrounded by photography. We’re so used to photography, we think, Oh, that looks just like a photograph, meaning photographs are the most realistic images around.

Well, they’re not. If you look at some artwork that was done in the 1800s.

Crew Chief Eric: Like a Vermeer.

Bob Gillespie: Yes, 1600s. Yeah, a lot of Dutch painters, but there have been a lot of painters that have done what you’d call super realism. Which is more realistic than a photograph because they get [00:31:00] details in the darks. And details in the lights, you’ve got a full range that you could only get with multiple exposures of a photograph, just because the human eye can detect, you know, like a million different colors.

Don’t quote me on that, but photography is limited. But you can get more colors and paint than you can with photography.

Crew Chief Eric: That also lends to a conversation around the next generation of, let’s say, super realistic or photorealistic art. And that’s coming from AI generated

Bob Gillespie: these bots,

Crew Chief Eric: like a stable diffusion, a Dali, a mid journey, you know, those kinds of things.

So what’s your feeling, what’s your take, what’s your opinion on these types of programs that are now available and do they take away from the artistic world or the. Augmenting it in some way,

Bob Gillespie: I’d be interested to see AI generate a copy of one of my paintings, you know, which would be illegal. You know, you sign and [00:32:00] date a painting, you sign a number, a print, you have a certificate of authenticity that comes along with it.

I think AI generated artwork, and maybe I’m being naive about this, just make artwork from a good painter even more valuable, simply because the buyer knows it’s one of a kind, where AI could generate two paintings that are the same quite easily. I don’t know if they do. I haven’t seen how many lawsuits there have been yet on AI generated, but there’s also the, the surface too.

There’s a richness in the surface of a real painting that I would like to see AI try to copy. You know, in a one of a kind image. Yeah, you could make a lot of different copies of texture, a canvas in the right way, you know, and you say, okay, this brush mark is going to be here and we wanted the paint to be actually be thick.

I don’t know how you do all that with a one shot [00:33:00] AI image. I don’t know how you get that texture quality in there. I, I have a lot of questions about AI generated architecture.

Crew Chief Eric: I think we all do on multiple levels.

Bob Gillespie: No one has a good answer. Yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: But I could see it as a way for somebody starting out to use it as a tool to help them maybe communicate what’s in their head.

On to, let’s say an eight and a half by 11. I joke all the time, I’m not a graphic artist. I have a hard time communicating to somebody what exactly I would want to see on a canvas, but if I could mock it up in AI and then take it to you and say, Bob, okay, so this is sort of what’s in my brain. Can you make a painting out of this?

That would be really cool.

Bob Gillespie: Yeah, I think there would be a market for artists that would do that. Sure. I agree. I think all art makes life. It’s like Kurt Vonnegut said, I got a Kurt Vonnegut quote in the beginning of the book, which you read, and then there’s one at the end of the book that says, the arts are not a way to make a living.

They are a [00:34:00] very human way of making life more bearable. So I think if AI can generate some big murals in depressing locations. I think that would be wonderful. I don’t know if we should put illusions on the sides of cars.

Crew Chief Eric: I think we call those liveries, Bob.

Bob Gillespie: Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: but I get your point. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways to do this, but also there should be, and there are a lot of different tools in an artist’s toolbox, right.

Or, or on their palette, AI might just be another one. It can be used for good and it can probably be used for evil too. Right. In this instance. And I think that leads us into our next question, which is talking about commissions and getting in line at the deli counter for some Bob Gillespie art. So how do we acquire some of your art?

How does one purchase your pieces or go about getting something made?

Bob Gillespie: I’m quite proud that I, uh, with the help of a friend, I’ve developed a new website called glenspeed. art. Right now it’s [00:35:00] got about 30 of my most popular prints on it. People can buy my artwork. I signed a numbered print online. Again, I’m a controlled freak.

I make my own prints. I’ve got a 10 color printer. I control the whole process and the quality of it. And so, yes, people can buy my artwork or commission a painting through glenspeed. art is my website.

Crew Chief Eric: We talked about, you know, how do you choose your next painting, but what’s next? What are you working on?

Any spoilers? Anything you can share?

Bob Gillespie: I’m doing volume two of the Watkins Glen International Coloring Book. I did a coloring book in 1998, and now It’s been a few years and the Racetrack would like me to do another one. I’m working on that and then I’m going to work on the festival poster for next year for the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Vintage Festival.

The theme is Porsche, so I’m excited about that. A

Crew Chief Eric: lot of other artists we’ve talked to Go to different car shows or events, or they have viewings and things like [00:36:00] that. Do you have anything lined up in terms of where people can come and see your art in person?

Bob Gillespie: Well, they could go to the Franklin street gallery in Watkins Glen.

I’m just up the road. They could stop by at my place if they wanted to see some artwork. I’m happy to say that I’m fortunate to sell just about all of my artwork. I have very little here at my house that I’ve done because I’ve, I’ve sold just about all of it. I’ve got a big old Victorian house and, uh, I work on big paintings in certain rooms and small paintings at the kitchen table.

So I’ve painted in about every room in our house. But yeah, Franklin Street, Mark and Glenn, it would be the place to see a lot of my artwork for sale.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, Bob, we’ve reached that part of the episode where I like to invite our guests to share any shout outs, promotions, thank yous, or anything else that you’d that we haven’t covered thus far.

Bob Gillespie: I’d like to put out a big thank you to the International Motor Racing Research Center for all the help they’ve been to me over the years. Bill Green, Sports Car Club of [00:37:00] America, which has been wonderful to me. I’m a member of the Glenn Region Chapter, the people at Watkins Glen Promotions, the people at the Watkins Glen Chamber of Commerce.

I’m very fortunate to have a lot of people that have encouraged me and given me an opportunity to exhibit and sell my work.

Crew Chief Eric: Bob’s book includes quotes that he chose to shed light on the creative process. They were made by artists that he admires and unexpectedly his auto racing paintings enabled him to befriend a generation of remarkable people involved with American road racing.

Many of those are no longer with us, and their quotes are also included and offer first person insights and perspectives on the sport. Bob believes there is a shared state of mind between artists and race drivers. Perhaps it’s a reliance on intuition along with a constant striving for perfection. If you’d like to pick up a copy of Bob’s book, One Track Mind, The Art of Bob Gillespie, you can log on to www.

glenspeed. art to order a copy [00:38:00] for yourself or someone you know that would enjoy a wonderful book like this, too. And with that, Bob, I can’t thank you enough for coming on Break Fix again, but this time sharing your passion for motorsports, enthusiasm, and art with us. You are the living embodiment of why we do this show.

These are the kinds of stories we love. You’re the type of enthusiast that we all look up to going live an incredible life, steeped and surrounded by motorsport, which is something that we all aspire to do. So Bob, thank you for what you’ve done for the community, for the world, for everyone, and keep doing what you do best painting and drawing and putting out some fantastic artwork.

Bob Gillespie: Thank you so much, Eric. I really appreciated the opportunity. All this enthusiasm is just a wonderful thing for us to share with our feelings about automobiles and history and racing. It keeps us all young.

Crew Chief Eric: We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of Brake Fix Podcast, [00:39:00] brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports. If you’d like to be a guest on the show or get involved, be sure to follow us on all social media platforms at GrandTouringMotorsports. And if you’d like to learn more about the content of this episode, be sure to check out the follow on article at GTMotorsports.

org. We remain a commercial free and no annual fees organization through our sponsors, but also through the generous support of our fans, families, and friends through Patreon. For as little as 2. 50 a month, you can get access to more behind the scenes action, additional Pit Stop minisodes, and other VIP goodies, as well as keeping our team of creators free.

Fed on their strict diet of fig Newtons, gummy bears, and monster. So consider signing up for Patreon today at www. patreon. com forward slash GT motorsports, and remember without you, none of this would be [00:40:00] possible.

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Introduction to Break/Fix Podcast
• 01:07 Meet Bob Gillespie: The Artist and Petrolhead
• 01:35 Early Inspirations and Career Beginnings
• 02:45 Transition to Art and Photography
• 04:11 Capturing Racing History in Paint
• 04:56 The Excitement of Watkins Glen
• 06:16 Choosing Artistic Mediums
• 09:13 Creating Large-Scale Murals
• 10:37 The Story Behind the Chamber of Commerce Mural
• 13:44 Techniques and Challenges in Mural Painting
• 18:21 The Most Beautiful Car: A Personal Opinion
• 20:15 The Ugliest Car of All Time
• 20:59 Switching Gears: One Track Mind
• 21:42 The Inspiration Behind the Book
• 24:09 The Excitement of Motorsport Art
• 26:08 Favorite Spots at Watkins Glen
• 29:12 Photorealism and AI in Art
• 34:45 Acquiring Bob Gillespie’s Art
• 36:41 Shout Outs and Final Thoughts

Bonus content available as a #PITSTOP mini-sode.

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