When I discussed with Jonesey writing a brief account of his upcoming show at Legge Gallery in Sydney I was rather taken aback by the title he announced to me. On the Rock ‘n’ Roll.

‘Well Jonesey, you’d like to let every one know you’re on the dole?’

‘Was on the dole!’, Jonesey said.

We’ve been looking at and admiring each others work for years. Alan’s paintings live in a psychological space that most people are scared to visit. He works feverishly, preferring small intimate studio space and pallid colour. Although he assures me the paintings are about the anxiety and inner turmoil of a past period of surviving off the dole in meagre accommodation on the fringes of Sydney, there is a deeper, sometimes far more sinister symbolism akin to late Philip Guston works that is hard to ignore in Alan’s paintings. In fact Alan and I discovered Guston around the same time. Alan was trying to break the strict painterly abstract expressive rules programmed into him at his school and I was attempting to re-invigorate the use of paint that my school had (almost) successfully dispatched from my own practice. Like Guston, Alan works through the night. He is a quiet observer in daylight and then a feverish documenter of experience at night. Obscure and sometimes absurd symbols appear throughout the exhibition. They are an invitation into the artist’s experience and a psychological statement about anxiety and fear. They are a painfully honest response to the world. He doesn’t conceptualise and he doesn’t attempt to flirt with what is in fashion. His is a very real vision.

These are ambitious works but Alan is quite the opposite. He paints as though he were possessed, as though the action of making takes over from the process of thinking. Of course this isn’t quite true. Jonesey labours meticulously over every work. There is though little time for study and inspiration from other’s work. This exhibition reads like a map of the inside of the artist’s crazed head. Everything is laid bare and open. There are quiet moments in the show. The landscape paintings are clear metaphors of the silent space we’d probably most like to inhabit, but Respite #1 has an unsettling resemblance to John Glover’s A View of the Artist’s House and Garden, Mills’ Plains (1834-5) and the dank green of Respite #2 allows an uncomfortably powerful feeling of discontent. Both landscapes are painted as though they are the sites of some ghoulish and terrible action. Glover’s house is gone and only the marks of human existence are left – ploughed fields and exotic trees. It’s in the devilish humour of On the Rock ‘n’ Roll #6 that I find a little respite. But then again I’m not going to visit this show for a breather. Alan has been spending night after night for over a decade pushing the boundaries around and the dozens of silvery layers of sticky medium he applies only heighten the anxious feelings I get from his work. On the Rock ‘n’ Roll is as much about Alan as it is about all of us. He has given us a dark, singular and private view of the world – a view that I hope to be privileged to see for many, many more years.

Ben Quilty