Quentin Sprague

A richly illustrated study of Australian modernist painter Ken Whisson's life and work. Ken Whisson (1927-2022) was one of Australia's foremost artists, widely acclaimed for an unwaveringly idiosyncratic practice that charted a singular course through seven decades of modern and contemporary Australian painting. Celebrated in his lifetime with the 2012 retrospective exhibition, Ken Whisson – As If, at the Museum...

Winner of the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-fiction. Set amid the striking landscapes of the East Kimberley, The Stranger Artist is an evocative and enthralling account of a remarkable decade in Australia’s internationally acclaimed Aboriginal art movement. At the end of the twentieth century, one-time gallerist Tony Oliver finds himself deeply immersed within a group of senior Gija...

A luminous collection of essays on art, obsession and creativity from one of Australia’s best critics. Why do we revere the figure of the artist? Is the drive to create an innate human instinct or a form of compulsion? Is the provocateur more lauded than the realist? Why do artists do what they do, day after day, in a display...