Deutscher and Hackett

Fundamental to the highly enigmatic, gestural form of abstraction for which Ken Whisson has become renowned is the premise that art should be produced with intuitive spontaneity. As illuminated in his lecture on 'Technique and Intuition' at the Ballarat Art School in 1994, Whisson believes artistic creation reaches its zenith in the moment where the artist's conscious eyes and mind are totally surprised by what the brush has intuitively produced: '...By not looking at your own work you don't lose the thread of development, the ideas and developments come back from that dark pile of hidden paintings in a way that they will not come back if you look at them and wonder about them, have doubts, or worse, let them seduce you into thinking that what you have already done is your style and way of painting.'¹

Interestingly, this honest and unpretentious approach to painting has resulted in a truly sophisticated, complex visual language that exerts increasingly compelling appeal on the viewer. Forms which initially appear disordered and unrelated, floating in spatial ambiguity, suddenly become familiar; as John McDonald observes, '...Looking at one of Whisson's works is like studying a diagram of the thinking mind.'²

Like the celebrated Disembarkation for Cythera 1976 (National Gallery of Australia), the present Motor Cars and Drivers 1975 belongs to an important group of paintings which derive their impetus from the artist's experience of living in St Kilda, Melbourne during the 1970s. Indeed, the daily bustle of the beach, seaport and esplanade left such an indelible impression upon Whisson that, more than two decades later, as an expatriate living in Italy, he would again draw upon these memories as inspiration for his art.

1. Whisson, K., 'Talk 1994' reproduced in Ken Whisson: Paintings 1947-1999 with Writings and Talks by the Artist, Niagara Publishing, Melbourne, 2001, p.43
2. McDonald, J., 'Introduction', cited ibid., p.9

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