]] In 1944 Gleeson created "The sower" referencing Jean-François Millet's 1850 painting of the same title. Rather than showing a landscape with a conglomerate main figure, Gleeson presents an eerie twentieth-century view of a desolated one. He commented on the work's genesis as a response to the trauma of longtime warfare:During the 1950s and '60s he moved to a more symbolic perspective, notions of human perfectibility. At this time he increasingly fashioned small psychedelic compositions made using the surrealist technique of decalcomania in the background, to suggest a landscape, and finished by adding a fastidiously painted male nude in the foreground. Many of his paintings had homoerotic undertones, something which reflected on Gleeson's own homosexuality. The ideas for these compositions also saw Gleeson move into collage with his "Locus Solus" series, where he produced a substantial body of work by placing dismembered photographs, magazine illustrations, diagrams and lines of visionary poetry against abstract pools of ink.