[1] Gleeson's family owned the hotel at the Central Coast NSW town of Gosford and the cool room was sometimes used as a makeshift morgue.
One of his teachers was May Marsden who persuaded him to switch from poetry to art to explore his hatred of fascism as the war came to Australia.
Gleeson's later work featured the male nude, as a gay artist he was a rarity in the middle of the twentieth century.
Gleeson's phantasmogoria referred to the artists mindscape and sometimes a self portrait would pop out from the morass of muscular male nudes and weird forms under a stormy sky.
In 2008, the James Gleeson Oral History Collection's significance was recognised by it being inscribed into the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register.