For Philip Jones and his long term partner Barrie Reid, Heide renowned as the birthplace of Australian modern art was a place to call home for more than twenty-five years and John and Sunday Reed were like surrogate parents. Art + Life, his deeply personal account of post-war Melbourne at Heide, is in part a debt of gratitude and in part an effort to set the record straight, to separate the real people from the larger-than-life mythologised figures the Reeds have become in the annals of Australian art history.

Philip Jones was there, in the midst of this high bohemian world where the boundaries between art, sexual experimentation, indulgence and talent were stretched. The Reeds and their peers were his circle of friends from the 1950s to the present day. He knew them all Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Joy Hester, Albert Tucker, Fred Williams, Charles Blackman, Hal Porter, Sumner Locke Elliott, Don Dunstan, Jim Cairns, the Moras, Max Harris and saw them at their best and worst.

Never short of opinions, Philip Jones offers a candid account of a time where art and life coalesced into a revolutionary gesture flung into the face of a rigidly conventional, bigoted, if happily provincial, society’. The rebels in this narrative changed the way we live and think, by embracing the modern and scorning the parochial. Art + Life lays out the canvas of their lives in all its messy and sophisticated glory.