James Gleeson
(Australia 21 Nov 1915–20 Oct 2008)
- Title
- Study for 'Something is going to fall like rain'
- Other titles:
- Study for painting
Study - Year
- 1983
- Media category
- Drawing
- Materials used
- pastel
- Dimensions
-
35.5 x 50.7cm sheet
- Signature & date
- Signed and dated l.l., pen and ink "Gleeson 12.1.1983".
- Credit
- Gift of the artist 1989
- Accession number
- 145.1989
- Copyright
- © Gleeson/O'Keefe Foundation
- Location
- Not on display
- Further information
The title of this work is from three lines in W H Auden's poem 'The witnesses' 1932-34: 'The sky is darkening like a stain;/ Something is going to fall like rain,/ And it won't be flowers'.
'... It was one of the key poems that I discovered many years ago, that had an effect on me like the T S Eliot poems', Gleeson quoted in Renée Free's unpublished catalogue of James Gleeson's work.
This pastel is a study for the bottom half of the painting. Another drawing in the AGNSW collection is also for the bottom half of the painting [see 138.1990.2], while another is for the top half [see 138.1990.1].
'This has an even more tormented sky ... In a key position in it, a fairly generalised adaptation of El Greco's 'View of Toledo' [circa 1597-99, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York]. This has been a painting I always admired and have never been disenchanted with ... it is one of THE greatest landscape paintings of all time to my mind. I wanted to imply something of the mood of that painting but transmuted into an imaginary world beyond the normal visual experience one could have in nature ... I was very conscious of the fact that it was painted at a time when the Inquisition was in full force and that the burning of heretics was probably going on at the very moment when the painting was made. I felt the world today is in a predicament not unlike that', Gleeson quoted in Free.
Hendrik Kolenberg and Anne Ryan, 'James Gleeson: drawings for paintings', Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2003, pg. 75.
- Bibliography (1)
-
Hendrik Kolenberg (Netherlands; Australia) (Author), Anne Ryan (Australia) (Author), James Gleeson: drawings for paintings, Domain, 2003, 75 (colour illus.). cat.no. 28c
- Exhibition history (2)
-
James Gleeson: drawings for paintings, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 12 Apr 2003–15 Jun 2003.
Australian Drawings 1988-1989, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1989?–1989?.
