Ken Whisson

The artist
Watters Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 2003

John MacDonald, Ken Whisson: Paintings 1947-1999, Melbourne: Niagara Publishing, 2001, pl. 25, p. 41 (illus.)

Work is framed in a limed box frame. There are no tears. In the vertical white rectangle there is apparnt cracking. There is also scattered cracking in of the red patch. Most of the cracking is no broken. There are many fine and apparent cracks that have not shrunk or have opened in the white area, upper centre. There is a dint lower centre. There is some discoloration and scuffing around the edges. FIONA TO RE-DO
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Ken Whisson began his career and could still be described as a figurative expressionist. However, the primary motifs within his compositions – fields and trees, human figures and domestic animals, cars, boats and aeroplanes, furniture, houses and factories – are sometimes so abbreviated and distorted, so torn or shattered, so reflected or refracted, as to push the works to the edge of abstraction. The paintings swing between cartoonish narrative and a spare, linear, late de Kooning elegance. Fellow-artist Rosalie Gascoigne once wrote: " ... His image is of a general rather than a particular order. It says more by insisting on less. It sets you off watching the painting, considering your experience, sharpening your eye on the world, and gradually discovering, even if only in part, what Whisson saw or felt and why he chose to paint in the way he did. It is an exhilarating and continuing experience.'¹ 

The fluttering, swelling and cinching liquid forms of flying flags would obviously appeal to Whisson the shape-shifter, and  indeed they appear in works from the 1960s, such as the drawing Flag and pole (1966, National Gallery of Australia). However, following a residency at the Ballarat College of Advanced Education in 1976-1977, and possibly inspired by seeing the Eureka Flag at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, the artist began to focus more tightly on the idea. Flag painting (1976, National Gallery of Australia) shows a group of figures parading with banners, and there follows an extended series which were not pictures of flags, but were in themselves flags, flat arrays of shapes and symbols, like the famous Asafo company flags of Ghana's Fante people.

The title of the whole sequence, Flags of my disposition, is typically ambiguous, in its conflation of mood and location. So, too, are the subtitles of individual works dense and baffling: Flag for David Ireland, Flag for the City of Sydney, Flag for Captain Ahab and Thomas Szaz, even Flag for the Red Brigades and the Hudson Institute (who each in their very different ways has the courage to think the unthinkable).²  The present work, Flag for a small industrial suburb, is the sixth in the series, coming in between Above Balmain³ and Flag for a small lethal airforce. While it is not an easy image to decipher, the canvas does contain possible suggestions of concrete suburban realities: hillsides, highways, road markings, street signs, factory chimneys, perhaps even a truck's long, vertical rear-vision mirror. Equally striking is the implicit social emptiness, the absence of identifiable people or animals.

Whisson's Flag for a small industrial suburb is a compelling and elegant abstraction, with linear crease-shadow pictograms of black and blue giving weight and definition to an empty, minimalist field of white. This is an art of symbolic-heraldic forms, not retinal images; a painting, yes, but at the same time a sign or a tag, a map or a diagram, a football jumper or a fluttering flag.

1. Rosalie Gascoigne, KenWhisson: selected paintings, Melbourne, RMIT Gallery, 1978, p.
2. Ahab is the obsessed whaling captain in Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Thomas Szaz a psychiatrist, social critic and author of The myth of mental illness. The Red Brigades were Italian Marxist-Leninist terror cells active during the 1970s, and the Hudson Institute is a U.S. conservative (free market, pro-technology) think tank.
3. This is the title as it appears in a Deutscher Fine Art catalogue of April 1994; Perspecta (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1981) gives it as Above Bahrein