James Gleeson Quotes about Art

James Gleeson was a famous Australian surrealist painter, arts writer, and poet. He is best known for his surreal depictions of myths, humanity, war, and dreams in a state of metamorphosis. Famous James Gleeson artworks include “The Sower”, “Avernus Transvisioned as Böcklin’s Isle“, “The Arrival of Implacable Gifts”, “Prospero’s Workshop”, “Lapsed Shadows Recycled to a Capable Coast”, “We Inhabit the Corrosive Littoral of Habit”, “Invented Memories of Tomorrow”, “Landscape with Self in Parenthesis”, “In the Range of Memory” and “The Spirit of Things”.

Mini biography: Born James Timothy Gleeson on the 21st of November, 1915 in Gosford, New South Wales, Australia. His mother was (Please let me know if you know his mother’s name) and his father James Gleeson died when he was a young child, forcing his mother to raise him and his sister herself. James Gleeson never married or had children and was an openly gay artist, with a number of his paintings exploring themes of homosexuality. The artist died on the 20th of October, 2008 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia at the age of 92.

List of Famous James Gleeson Art Quotes

Surrealism is an attempt – not to abandon reason but to make reason reasonable – to rejuvenate the concept of reason. It is the fantastic used as a method of elucidation. It aims at a re-orientation of values through a broadening of the concept of reality. James Gleeson

The line between ugly and beautiful is, like the equator, an imaginary line. In art its position varies with the viewer. For me, I doubt whether it exists at all. I doubt if it has any role to play in the search for the reality that lies beyond the apparent reality. James Gleeson

Metamorphosis has always been, for me, one of the basic facts of life. Everything takes on a form, changes, falls apart and reforms in new organizations as part of an endless cycle. James Gleeson

For a while, especially during the war years, I did think of Surrealism as a revolutionary weapon. I accepted Breton’s contention that by utilizing the subconscious one could arrive at a condition that held the rational mind in balance and perhaps prevent such disasters as war, indifference or fanaticism. James Gleeson

We know, of course that art doesn’t shape history, it follows history. This was not always clear to me, and on reflection it appears that the two currents that have shaped my life as an artist were founded on the belief that they could shape the future by changing our conceptions of the nature of reality. James Gleeson

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. James Gleeson

I was fascinated by what can only be described as verbal collage in the early T.S. Eliot – and in Guillaume Apollinaire’s Alcools. The dissonances, free associations, the stream of consciousness with its continuities and disjunctions – all these were weapons to be used in raids upon the unconscious. James Gleeson

James Gleeson Self Portrait Painting

More on Famous Australian Surrealist James Gleeson

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• Isle of the Dead Painting – See the different versions of the Isle of the Dead (Die Toteninsel) painting by Arnold Böcklin and an artwork by James Gleeson who was inspired by the masterpiece.

Related or similar popular artists and celebrities include: Salvador Dali, Odd Nerdrum, William Dobell, Brett Whiteley and other Famous Australian Artists.