KEN WHISSON

The artist, 312 Lennox Street, Melbourne
Collection of the late John Lockhart AO QC, Sydney; purchased from the above circa 1986

Ken Whisson, Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, 28 August - 9 September 1974, cat. 15
20th Century Australian and New Zealand Paintings, Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney, 17 June - 19 July 1992, cat. 39 (label on the reverse)

 

Good condition. Some surface dirt and small area of painting loss top centre (cloud) and shrinkage cracks upper right (tree). Two vertical scuff marks to the centre andd several scuff marks bottom edge.
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Born in country Victoria, Ken Whisson studied at Swinburne Technical College in Melbourne between 1944 and 1945 and took lessons with Danila Vassilieff 1945-46. He has lived in Perugia, Italy, since 1977 but returns regularly to Australia. In 1987 Whisson received the Visual Arts Board Emeritus Award for substantial contribution to Australian Art. His work is now represented in all major Australian public collections as well as in the British Museum in London and the Chartwell Collection, New Zealand.

John McDonald writes perceptively, 'One often feels as though he is presenting a travelogue, a kind of road movie in paint... Looking at one of Ken Whisson's works is like studying a diagram of the thinking mind. This is why their schematic forms begin to seem ever more familiar over time - they conjure up experiences and observations that virtually everyone holds in common'.¹ Earth, Houses and Vehicle is dated 1973-74. Inscribed on the reverse is 'Dunolly or Maldon', a reference - along with the image of the car - to townships in central Victoria that Whisson passed through in the course of a job distributing pamphlets in the early 1970s (a period between living in England 1968-70 and his appointment as Artist-in-Residence at Ballarat CAE in 1976).

While his paintings are clearly based on observed experience, they are neither mimetic nor narrative. For Whisson, art must integrate what is seen and felt and remembered. As he explained to a group of art students in 1994, 'Art is far too complex to be thought and has to come from a whole complex of intuitive processes, from an intuitive focusing of memories, ideas, emotions, including seeds and new beginnings left somewhere in the mind from past work. It comes from a focussing of all the different levels of consciousness'. ²

1.  John McDonald, 'Ken Whisson: Matter and Memory', Ken Whisson Paintings 1947-1999, Niagara Publishing, Melbourne, 2001, pp. 8-9.
2. Ken Whisson, 'Technique and Intuition', op. cit., p. 142.