drawing;
collage
- Museum number
- 2005,0227.6
- Description
-
(No title, swirling surrealistic forms in tumultuous clouds above sea), 20 January 1987
Crayon, charcoal, ink wash and collage on paper
- Production date
- 1991
- Dimensions
-
Height: 555 millimetres
-
Width: 480 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Text from Stephen Coppel, 'Out of Australia: Prints and Drawings from Sidney Nolan to Rover Thomas', with a contribution by Wally Caruana on Aboriginal prints, BMP, 2011, no.90.
Gleeson draws and paints with the inner eye of the imagination. From the late 1930s, when he first took up surrealism, he has adhered to its central precept of shaking up the viewer's habitual ways of evaluating reality by making use of the irrational. In this drawing from 1987 a swirling, tumultuous cloud engulfs the shore and the low horizon of the sea; within its amorphous mass is a profusion of roiling biomorphic apparitions suggestive of rock-pool organisms. The sense of an alternative reality is heightened by the small collaged fragments, either cut out or photocopied from technical illustrations, possibly of marine biology.
The boundary of earth, sea and sky represented by the shoreline provides the stage for Gleeson's dramatic surrealistic visions and the door to a different reality. The shoreline as the littoral border of the imagination has been an abiding preoccupation in his work. Gleeson later recalled the significance of growing up in coastal Gosford and his discovery of the rock-pools by the sea - 'these magical pools with their treasures of shapes and colours and (to me) unidentifiable objects. It was from these earlier experiences that I've developed this really quite deep interest in that inter-tidal area of the coast. It has stayed with me'. No painting is known to have been painted from this drawing.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
2011 May-Sept, BM, 'Out of Australia', cat. no.90.
- Acquisition date
- 2005
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 2005,0227.6