James Gleeson
| James Gleeson | |
|---|---|
| Born |
James Timothy Gleeson November 21, 1915 Hornsby, New South Wales, Australia |
| Died | October 20, 2008 (aged 92) Sydney, New South Wales, Australia |
| Education | East Sydney Technical College, Sydney Teachers College |
| Known for | Painting, Poetry, Writing |
| Movement | Surrealism |
James Timothy Gleeson (21 November 1915 – 20 October 2008) was an Australian artist. He served on the board of the National Gallery of Australia.
Gleeson was born in the Sydney district of Hornsby in 1915 and attended East Sydney Technical College from 1934 to 1936.
In 1938 Gleeson studied at Sydney Teachers College, where he gained two years training in general primary school teaching.Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, André Masson, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung became major influence in Gleeson's work.
Gleeson's themes generally delved into the subconscious using literary, mythological or religious subject matter. He was particularly interested in Jung's archetypes of the collective unconscious.
In 1944 Gleeson created The sower referencing Jean-François Millet’s 1850 painting of the same title. Rather than showing a landscape with a conglomerate main figure, Gleeson presents an eerie twentieth-century view of a desolated one. He commented on the work's genesis as a response to the trauma of longtime warfare:
I think that there was always the hope that it could influence the way people thought about war. That it could alert people to its horrors and prevent it occurring again. You see, I was born during the First World War in 1915, and my earliest experiences were with people who were in that war or remembered the war very vividly, and then, just when I was beginning to paint, the Second World War began. So war became a kind of lurking terror in my mind from infancy through to late adolescence, when it was all building up again for another one.
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