The Drawings of James Gleeson

Gleeson's painting technique is characterised by meticulous care; in the drawings another hand is revealed, a hand not afraid to be wildly spontaneous. In his painting Gleeson proceeds with painstaking attention to detail; in his drawings the alla prima gesture and accident are valued. The materials of Gleeson's paintings — oil on canvas — are those sanctioned by centuries of Western art; the mediums employed in his drawings are. on the other hand, experimental in a distinctly twentieth-century fashion. On paper he jumps from medium to medium; indeed the variety of mediums is one of the striking features of Gleeson's drawing oeuvre. He has used traditional mediums of pencil, charcoal and ink wash, but (more experimentally) has incorporated these with frottage, collage, block printing and with the commercial artists' mediums of air-brush and scraperboard.

Gleeson's range of materials may seem, in itself, of little importance, but his technique as a painter and a draughtsman leads us to the central paradox of his art. The paradox is the conjunction of imagery which is antirational with a painting technique as reliant on order and as structurally predetermined as, say, nineteenth-century salon painting. In 1945, some eight years after Gleeson had begun to make art seriously, his colleague at the Sydney Teachers' College, Bernard Smith, addressed this paradox in his history of Australian art, Place, Taste and Tradition. This was the first real discussion of Gleeson's art and Smith used the opportunity to speculate on the aspects of surrealism which interested the artist at the time, its social and political dimension. But his discussion also includes an assessment of Gleeson's relationship to European surrealism. According to the art historian, Gleeson's early experiments in surrealism arose 'more as inspirations derived from a conscious deliberation upon surrealist principles rather than as subconscious evocations realized by the surrealist method.¹

Despite their technical spontaneity these early works evoke ancient themes and mythologies, such as the story of Daphne — a figure turning into a tree. Spontaneity in Gleeson's draughtsmanship reaches its most extreme statement in a series of ink and wash drawings made in 1960 all titled Germination. Appropriately, for works so titled, these are the least defined of all Gleeson's drawings; they look like totally non-figurative expressions and are held together only by the focussing of their elements and energies (lines, splashes, dribbles) around a nucleus.

The quality of 'conscious deliberation' is less evident in the drawings than the paintings, although one would have to qualifr the statement with the observation that drawing itself, as a preparation to painting, is a process of conscious deliberation. Spontaneity is an important quality of the earliest drawings in this exhibition, from 1937 to 1939. These early drawings are executed with brush and ink, with ink washes which spill and puddle around the sketchy forms of figures and landscapes.

In another series of smaller, apparently spontaneous drawings made a decade later Gleeson created free-floating forms from a combination of block printing (from a block of polystyrene carved with an abstract pattern) and wash drawing. But the crucial element was added later — a tiny, precisely drawn nude figure. This (almost cheeky) touch invests the forms on the page with both scale and dimensionality; smudges, washes and brush marks suddenly provide an environment for the diminutive figure, suggesting landscapes, vapours and clouds. These drawings, to which Gleeson applied the generic title Psychoscape, point to one of the classic surrealist preoccupations — the different planes of experience co-existing with reason. They play on the way in which we expect to 'read' an image.

Despite the essentially notational quality of the Psychoscapes — they are executed on deckle-edged notepaper — they appear as significant pointers to the way in which Gleeson's work diverges from the surrealist agenda. Whereas the surrealists were in rebellion with the idea of man as the measure of all things, Gleeson, with his intense interest in the art traditions which have emerged out of the Greco-Roman world, celebrates man. Where the surrealists recoiled from the body, making of it an object of revulsion, Gleeson dwells on its wholeness; where the surrealists were destructive, Gleeson is laudatory.

This had not always been the case. In the mid-1940s Gleeson's work embodied the violence and anger which was abroad in the world. Paintings such as The sower 1944 and Citadel 1945 (National Gallery of Australia) are intended to produce visceral feelings of revulsion in the viewer. The studies for Citadel in the exhibition show how Gleeson built up the idea of the hideous mountain of flesh which is the central motif of the painting.

Gleeson has long been thought of as one of Australia's most literary artists. He has at various times been a writer on the work of other artists and a poet. Both of these intellectual pursuits have a considerable bearing on an understanding of his art. Gleeson has written at least two extensive studies of fellow artists in which drawing has been central to his exegesis. Both studies present different models of the way in which drawing has been used by artists in the twentieth century. Gleeson's masterly monograph on the work of his colleague Robert Klippel, published in 1983, examines the work of an artist who has used drawing in a fundamentally exploratory fashion, and the rhythm of whose career has seen an oscillation between alternate waves of drawing activity and sculptural work. In The Drawings of William Dobell in the Australian National Gallery published in 1992, Gleeson provided a text which looks at the place of drawing within the work of William Dobell, an artist who, unlike Klippel, used drawing as a directly preparatory activity. Dobell's use of drawing to refine ideas for painting is a usage which is not unlike Gleeson's in many respects.

In the Dobell drawings book Gleeson describes drawing as 'an enormously wide-ranging, infinitely varying and subtle activity … a graphic script of endless individual permutation'.² In a phrase in which Gleeson seems to be telling us more about his own art than Dobell's, he evocatively describes drawing as ‘one of the most potent, intuitive and yet highly evolved weapons that can be used to comprehend the unknown'.³

Gleeson also describes drawing as a form of script, a reductive language — 'a miraculous equivalent of the spoken and written word'.⁴ The interest in this parallelism between visual and verbal imagery is not new in Gleeson's work; poetry was an obsession from the outset of his career. As a young man Gleeson gave equal weight to verbal and visual experimentation, being unable to decide whether to become a painter or a poet. His was not a unique dilemma, but has been shared by many 'doubly-gifted' young artists, among them Sidney Nolan (born two years after Gleeson). Whereas Nolan had a highly developed sense of the different things which could and could not be done with visual and verbal imagery, Gleeson attempted a novel combination of the two in his 'poem drawings'. His first poem drawing was made in 1938. Over the course of the next four years Gleeson made other poem drawings in which the integration of the visual elements with the poems seemingly inscribed on them became increasingly sophisticated. Christopher Chapman has written of these drawings that they 'transformed the function of the poetic text into the visual' establishing 'a framework in which the written word and the drawn image are both afforded the same status'. ⁵

Poem drawings, important though they are, are a small part of Gleeson's drawing oeuvre, being restricted to a number of years in the late 1930s and early 1940s and again in the late 1970s. In more general terms his drawings are those of a committed painter. They lead us to an understanding of the well-springs of Gleeson's art. Appropriately for an artist who has taken his cues from surrealism, these sources remain so deeply embedded as to resist explanation. However, Gleeson's recent sketchbook drawings indicate the development of his most recent paintings. These minute pencil sketches, no more than several centimetres square, are the tiny notations which the artist uses to make larger drawings. From these drawings still larger paintings develop; the chance markings embodied in the thumbnail notations, when carried to the enormous scale of an easel painting, reveal unexpected worlds on a theatrical scale.

The idea of a tiny drawing containing the seeds of imaginary worlds is an idea which is simultaneously appealing to the contemporary mathematician and the Blakean visionary. And perhaps it is appropriate to see William Blake as the true precursor of James Gleeson, rather than the surrealist ideologue André Breton or Salvador Dali. Certainly Blake believed, as Gleeson does, in the importance of drawing (claiming that 'he must have a strange organisation of sight who does not prefer a Drawing on Paper to a Dawbing in Oil by the same master'⁶). But more importantly Blake also believed and Gleeson's work attests to his sharing the belief— in the primacy of the artist seeing beyond mere appearances: 'I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it & not with it'.⁷

Andrew Sayers
Curator, Australian Paintings and Drawings