Cecily Brown

Cecily Brown: Thanks, Roody Hooster -oil on linen, 2004

I think I might let the artist speak for themselves this time. Here's an interview with Cecily Brown which I found via Two Coats of Paint.

The boundaries of painting excite me. You've got the same old materials - just oils and a canvas - and you're trying to do something that's been done for centuries. And yet, within those limits, you have to make something new or exciting for yourself as well as other people.... Read more

Ken Whisson

Ken Whisson
House, Hills, Poultry and Trees 30.7.08 & 21.2.09 100 x 120cm
Image: courtesy of Watters Gallery


"If one acknowledges that the style of a Whisson painting is unmistakable, this is not to plunge the artist into a creative cul-de-sac. One of the reasons these pictures are individually so engaging and cumulatively so haunting, is that the problems they deal with are never predictable, their shapes never purely rhetorical. Each work has its own crisis to overcome, its own pictorial language to invent" from: John McDonald -Ken Whisson, A Survey catalogue

Love this quote. Love Ken Whisson. Let me try and articulate. Every so often I'm visited by that vexed question: Is painting dead? To cure me of such impure thoughts I'm always heartened by an idea (not just mine, I'm sure) that for every individual who paints there is a personal question each must seek to answer through their work. Perhaps I might even go so far as to say that sometimes those questions are so much better when they're not or never truly answered thus providing a painter with enough sustenance for a lifetime. Ken Whisson is a much loved Australian painter precisely because he revisits old territory in a way that never feels old or rehashed. It's always fresh - not just with respect to paint handling which, if you are lucky enough to see one in the flesh, is quite a special experience - but always because there seems to be an importance placed on the journey rather than the final outcome. Hence the scruffy, scumbly marks, the layered staccato lines drawn with paint that are smudged or half concealed and those strange shapes that hang, usually in white space, delightfully and necessarily unresolved. A life lived through painted marks. Perfect. I'm cured.