Artist Profile: Wade Gildersleeve

By Lauren Hill

With inspiration drawn from childhood memories of hiding beneath a grand piano as his father wailed out Jazz riffs with a cigarette hanging from his mouth, Wade Gildersleeve’s art communicates the smoky, masculine ambience of those early recollections. Growing up in a family of musicians in North Carolina, Wade’s talent came not in the form of musicality, but as a self-taught visual artist. As a young man he lived a kind of vagabond existence, spending time in the music and art scenes in California, the midwest, the Caribbean and North Carolina. But he settled in St. Augustine and has lived here for nearly 30 years, incorporating excess materials from his trade as a carpenter into his creative renderings.

Drift: How long have you been making art?
Wade Gildersleeve: Art is something that I’ve always done, first with pencils, drawing – my mom let me draw on the walls, so I did murals all around my room as an 8, 9, 10 year old. It was great encouragement, wasn’t it? My first subjects [of the murals] were old Universal monster movie stars, Frankenstein, the mummy, that kind of stuff. I’ve always been a film buff. When I was a kid it was a big thing to go downtown to the theatre and see whatever was coming out.

D: What kind of materials do you use?
WG: Anything I can get my hands on. I’m a carpenter, that’s my day job, and I’m really into working with wood and making things with my hands. I’m huge into that. Left over materials – I paint on plywood, foam board, dry wall, anything, paper bags, grocery bags. I’ll be at someone’s house and draw a picture on their grocery bag … I’ve got a quite a few of these hanging in people’s houses.

D: Do you choose such inexpensive, non-traditional materials out of necessity?
WG: No, it was in the beginning, but it’s fun, the different textures and the results you get.

D: Your work tends to focus on portraiture, why?
WG: It’s fun to paint the head and face. I usually always do that first. The torso. I don’t know, it’s just in there. I take a bunch of paint and block it all in, just get paint on it, first thing, fill in the space and start moving it around, with the light and dark. And usually save the eyes ’cause that’s the fun part, that’s the crème de la crème. No two are alike, are they?

D: How did you end up in St. Augustine?
WG: I was living in a cabin with no power in the mountains of North Carolina and we were snowed in. I had a friend down here so I came to see him as soon as the snow had melted enough and I was like, “No more snowed-in cabin.” I came here in a 5-speed car that only had two gears. It didn’t have reverse so we always had to park where we could get out and had to push start it.

D: It seems like you’ve resisted more traditional jobs throughout your life, why?
WG: Oh yeah, definitely. I can’t stand anybody telling me what to do. I worked for the man for a while and couldn’t take it. You don’t want to live your life like that. Think of all the people that hate what they’re doing, they go to that drudgery everyday. Before you know it, your life is over.

photos by Rachel Bardin