THREE MOONS

I had been thinking, obsessing even, about Monto for about a year before I found myself there. In Monto, I could stay in a pub with XXXX banners plastered on all sides. In Monto, there would be old anaemic gums, barbed wire fences to duck under, open Country and no dotted lines on the road. At this place, there was also an obscenely large collection of artwork in storage and sheds. Floating in my mind, it became a mirage, a delusion on the high bush, its isolation so splendid and unthinkable, the very existence of such an archive astonishes. I had flown to the sunshine coast and then driven six hours inland with all this in mind. Looking back, perhaps I had seen too many outback films; I was a victim of the Paul Hogan complex.

All the artwork waiting for me in Monto came from the same person: Gil Jamieson. Anyone who knows of Gil knows him as one of the formative big-bangs of 20th-century Australian Figuration. He is the outlaw elite, known for his predilection for getting into bar fights, his cosmic planes of land, his frequent bush sabbaticals, and his distaste for art-world politics, power and opportunity. If what they say is true, and money does talk, then Gil didn't really listen to what it had to say, at least not as much as his friends did. By the time he passed, he had around 3000 works succeeding him, all of which his son Matthew is now the custodian.

We like to think of the art market as this unbiased doctrine of meritocracy, blind to everything but innovation and aesthetics. Unfortunately, it rarely plays out that way, and Gil was certainly a casualty of this. For a perishable moment there, the Australian Idea seemed like it was about to achieve itself. But then, all of Gil's art-world equivalents from the '50s: Brack, Blackman, Boyd (both Arthur and David ), Perceval etc., with whom he shared Antipodean* ideals and strong friendships, all became laminated household titans of Australian art while Gil never wholly entered the mainstream discourse despite his continual auction house sales.

Gil painted hot, he was concerned with something much larger than beauty, something more durable, always working against the inertia of art market appetites. His painting defies easy definition. Calling him an 'Australian Painter' would be like calling Tracey Emin a 'Margate Painter'. Gil's work is universal. When he wasn't painting undulant auroras over Monto and its surrounding terrain, he was painting the churned and twisted-up torsos of feral dog-creatures, chimerical arachnid-women and depraved men.

This corporeality he returns to is a testament to his belief that art did not have a duty to be uplifting or decorative - a value that is especially lacking in today's collective art psyche. Some would call his practice unsanctimonious, but for all his habits and strangeness, Gil never did anything halfway. His conjuring of the world is at once nightmarish and mystical. His intimacies with natural orders are keenly felt in all his life's work. There is a particular piece called 'The Scrap' in which Gil's uncanny perceptual intelligence makes both perpetrator and victim of himself. Thick scrapes of blushing colour ironies sit you in a different kind of timeframe. Time moves slowly here, at first nothing stays put. Everything is molten and amorphous. And then, the outstretched bicep of a man is relinquished to the eye, and it lands on another's chin. At first indiscernible: hate, heat-stricken, two men in a fight —this is the atmosphere of roman warfare and conquests. Gil did that often- revisiting instances of his own transgressions, peering back in time from the icy vantage of someone unbound by emotional bias.

The Gil Jamieson body: dashed, swiped and bruised, with its litany of wounds, opens the sluices of a feral, ancient mystery and provides a glimpse into what his version of life was. The work is at times ego-maniacally self-enclosed but also at times, incredibly atoning. Gil had a real animal knowing of life's cycles. Violence, a thing as taboo as failure or bad teeth, is also the primary motivator of entropy. Unsurprisingly, these particularly harrowing elements of Gil's work did him no favours in terms of commercial success. The work we customarily attach to Gil's name is largely excluding of his darker paintings.

His decaying, entropic works are belligerent, beautiful and important. They give one a sense of the blind, immense and impersonal forces that will endure us all. The violence they attest to has been absorbed by an order of time that dwarfs any human act. We were evidence of this, the three of us looking down at these paintings decades after their conception. Gil's obvious talent and delight at arresting flesh on canvas is a reminder of the body's impermanent, provisional nature, and how life tends to defile it. In a way, Gil's unflinching investigation of cruelty confirmed to me the indifference of Mother Nature, the ambivalence of vitality, how life is always shifting into death and out again.

On my long drive across open Country on my trip into Three Moon, it struck me that the stuff of Gil's paintings could be gleaned right here, from the sprawling Queensland bush. That tree could be his tree, that creek bend could be his bend.

Now driving down the bowels of a flood-torn track into a gully, with four cameras between us, squished and jolting around on the front bench seat of Matthew's Toyota, Drew and I were doing our best to stay upright and not break anything. A day earlier, when confronted with the sheer scale of work to sift through, we had propositioned Matthew that we might return some of Gil's landscape works back to their respective locations. He agreed. So, with a stack of canvases wrapped in flannel in the back, we set out on a quest to return these works to their genesis - a spooky thing, especially considering their creator has passed. Marching through the scrub and spinifex, we were re-introducing Gil's 'Dingo Shooting', painted in '65. It is another of Gil's conquests, a resurrected, calcified and electric painting of a Dingo being pursued, its head bursting. The 'Dingo' was made during an interesting period in Gil's career; it is decadent. Matthew would have turned two the year this painting was conceived.

I cannot pretend objectivity here, something seismic hit me in that gully. Each holding a corner of the canvas, Matthew and I, with our feet treading the very same section of earth the painting depicted, became unknowing conductors of the art. More than any other artist I know, Gil had a real knack for catching the impurity of time, its slipperiness, the way it sloshes back and forth. Together, we closed a circuit. Whether he knew it or not, in painting these works, Gil laid down the foundations for wrinkles in the fabric of the space-time continuum to form. One of which Matthew, Drew and I were now inexorably caught. Time turns tricks, time flies. The last time these works were here, Gil was painting them.

This is a Monto parable, but a true one:

The land surrounding Monto and Hurdle Gulley is called 'Three Moon'. It got this namesake a long, long time ago when it was foretold by an indigenous man that "Boss said there will be three moons tonight. One in the creek, one in the billy and one in the sky."

Matthew Jamieson has never shot a dingo. An environmental activist and reformed Entomologist with an alien ringtone, he drinks coffee from exclusively glass cups and has a great smile. An enigmatic man and avid disciple of 'the cause'- whatever that may be. There are a few things he shares with his father, the most obvious of which is 'Three Moon Flat', his intergenerational family home, into which I was lucky enough to be welcomed for a few days. Like his father's work, Matthew's personality is resistant to summary, though describing him as a contemporary prophet might come closest. He treads lightly. He takes his shoes off when he is on Country to ensure the 'spirits can see him'. He deals in apparitions, legends and stories. Deep waters of creativity run through him, and his lessons are often hard learnt. As a result of this, his visions of the unfolding world are infectious, frightening and wonderful. Over breakfast, it would be tales of Pangea; during our drives, it would be anecdotes of Guerilla warfare and, over dinner, an account of the ultra-rare species of endemic butterfly "The Saturn Blue".

Matthew recalls burning a stack of paintings in the backyard when he was young under his father's instructions. Gil didn't even hang around to watch the canvases burn. Instead, he said, "I'm not an abstract expressionist", and walked away. He buried his father in a bed of wattle in an unmarked grave under a volcanic rock (the kind Gil loved to paint).

There is a painting hanging on the far left of Matthews museum named 'Spirit and the Horseman'. The channels of flooded paint seem to stop, start, resume and change modes all on one plane. It is a picture of an inebriated man, a corpse, another of Gil's golems suspended in a turbid, aqueous solution in the bottom left of the scape. Above him, a sweeping tide of crimson and amber with a dream-horse figure inside it bends in upon him. I recognise the expression on his face, a dark emotional resolve. There is the bad news of what is to come, and then there's the sweetness of the spectacle above him. There is no space left, no time, just the whistling breath of eternity, not of God, but of the natural order of things. I understand this concept appears inaccessible and strung-out to some because of religion and all its versions. Still, when you meet 'Spirit and the Horseman', for a moment, there is no need for the cross or the rose, or the light beyond the sun, or the Godhead. It is the protean body, come and gone —that's the surviving miracle.

The concept of heritage is called to question throughout this story. What is passed on and what isn't? The Jamieson inheritance is a reconsideration of what legacy means if you come at it slant, if you disrupt it by the very fact of being there, prying it open, day after day. It is worth mentioning that as expected, both of Matthew's daughters are powerful, promising artists. Three generations, two of which were almost eclipsed by the first. Three moons, all reimagining art, pulling it to and fro like tides.

There are private truths shared between Matthew and I that are too sacred to repeat, but I will say this: It is because of Matthew that Gil's work continues. Because of Matthew, any one of us can now experience this magic. The spatial bottom of Gil's life’s work drops out, you can feel the winds of history, resistance and repair. Matthew is a commodity, a true patron of mysticism. A believer in the symbol, the myth, the rite. He is the part of yourself that wakes from vivid dreams understanding that there is truth within it. The part of yourself that is a storyteller. This is the lifeblood of creativity.

Quite often, I reflect on the healing effects of grief, neurosis and destruction in art, but writing has not yet helped me to see what it means. Is art resolving? Can you paint a nightmare to make a difference? It depends on how you think about dreams. It depends on what you think a dream does when it is confessed to the world and its realities. After Monto, I feel that whatever else it is that you make or do, it is worth tending to Utopia—tending, without stop, to something that might one day outlive you.