KEN WHISSON

Ray Hughes Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney

Ken Whisson is widely admired for his semi-abstract compositions, with their elegantly suggestive scraps and flags of  landscape and architecture, figures and livestock, ships, aeroplanes and cars.

Less well known but equally potent are his early, expressionist paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, produced under the influence of his teacher, the charismatic Danila Vassilieff. In such works, pinched and twisted faces atop unevenly stuffed bodies are frozen in existential tableaux of enclosure and alienation. They represent a final flowering of the Angry Penguins tradition, and their neglect prompted painter and critic Robert Rooney to describe Whisson as 'the Cinderella of Australian Expressionism.' ¹ At the time, Robert Hughes described the work as '...compelling; it is always crude, and very often his drawing collapses altogether, but he has a vision, he is impelled to paint beliefs out of his system, and he knows where his images of fright and noise and dog-like sex are leading. This can be claimed for few young painters in Australia.' ²

The present work is such a rarity, and can probably be dated to circa 1953. The blocky, rough hewn faces in the vehicle are stylistically comparable to those in dated prints from this period. More generally, the mood of urban alienation is very much consistent with works of this early date. There is no social wholeness, neither in the two severed and boxed-up passengers' heads, nor in the cut-off figure of the frog mouthed, shelf-bosomed pedestrian passing in front of their car.

Interestingly, the central figure is reputed to be a self portrait. Despite being one of the few Australian artists to celebrate the motor vehicle, perhaps most notably in Domestic Machine, 1974 (Orange Regional Art Gallery), the artist does not drive.

1. 'Ken Whisson, Artist's Artist', The Australian, 12 July 1983, p. 13
2. The Nation, no. 95, 2 June 1962, p. 21