Gregory Gillespie; Artist Known for Attention to Realistic Detail

Gregory Gillespie, 63, an artist known for an obsessive attention to realistic detail. Gillespie painted landscapes, street scenes, portraits, and sexual and religious allegories in a shifting range of styles. Continuity was provided by a sense of unflinching scrutiny that often gave his work a disturbing edge. His widow, Peggy, said the artist had suffered from mental illness, including depression, throughout his life. Gillespie, who was at the heart of the group of western Massachusetts painters known as Valley Realists, studied art at New York’s Cooper Union in the 1950s, the apex of Abstract Expressionism. His works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Institution, as well as Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Last fall, Gillespie was honored with a retrospective show of three decades of his work, which appeared at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Mass. On Wednesday in Belchertown, Mass., of suicide.