The Arrival of the Immaculate Gifts

~ image ~ Sedja stands before The Arrival of the Immaculate Gifts by James Gleeson

It is the pleasure of an artist to be a pilgrim to the great galleries, often built like ancient stone temples, defying time with their immortal treasures.

On one visit to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1986, I came upon an amazing work by the Australian surrealist painter James Gleeson, entitled The Arrival of the Immaculate Gifts.

For most of his career as an artist, Gleeson painted as if living in Europe, creating works that did not look or feel like Antipodean art.

The master of paint served a long apprenticeship, as it was only when he reached the age of 65 and retired from employment as an art critic, that he was gripped with a new vision which finally revealed that he had grown deep roots into the Australian land and sea scape.

The Arrival of the Immaculate Gifts was one of the first works in this newly invigorated style in 1985, when Gleeson was 70 years old.

Look closely and you will see that it is in part drawing inspiration from Turner's The Shipwreck and taking the story forward in time onto the fatal shore of the Australian land and sea scape, where many have perished on the ocean attempting to reach the land Down Under.

Upon returning to Tasmania, I was delighted to discover another Gleeson gracing the wall of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, called The Nest of Premonitions, which I would spend time with during visits to the city and ever find some new element to wonder upon.

Having been in an ocean cave where the innards of the living sea had been tossed up and revealed, I could feel what Gleeson was saying with his surreal imagery in paint.

I knew this story of the land and sea and sky flowing through his story spread with colour upon canvas to echo through time for others to find.

In 1993 I would have bought that Gleeson in the Watters Gallery in East Sydney, though I know not its name now, if I had the $7000.

It was like a work of devotional art, that would ever inspire, that would ever reveal some new element, as if a hidden program was renewing its form when not seen.

When I see art that draws on the sap of the land, I am left wondering if I am seeing and feeling the dreaming that we hear of in Australian Aboriginal culture, telling the story of the Earth through the dreams of the elders.

Gleeson is gone now, having passed on at the ripe old age of 92, but from his hands there are hundreds of works in the new style of an elder artisan, gifting something immortal to the world and the lovers of art.