Among Australia’s most prominent surrealists, James Gleeson himself wrote about this self-portrait:

Above the head a hand holds a ‘blood line’ which links all the elements in the painting. Someone has suggested it represents the hand of God. My own feeling is that it is a symbol of my father who died in the Spanish Flu pandemic early in 1919, when I was barely three years old. I have no recollection of him at all, though from a surviving drawing he did in his teens (dated 1897) without art training of any kind, I seem to detect a talent that was never allowed to develop. The figure in the bridal gown was adapted from a photograph of my mother, and at the end of the ‘blood line’ the little boy looking at the sky and holding a balloon / moon / sun / world is of course an early me, wondering what lies ahead.