Australian painter Colley Whisson has been painting from the age of 20, encouraged by his father, Eric Whisson, also an artist.
Colley Whisson uses a bright palette and an appealingly textural rendering technique, in which forms are defined by bold strokes of heavy paint, laid on with very visible evidence of the brush.
He utilizes both crisply delineated edges and contrastingly blurred passages. You can see this better when his work is reproduced larger than the small images I’ve displayed above. I’ve included a detail crop of the last image at bottom.
Whisson has a fascination for boldly defined forms, both in their geometry and in the value and color contrasts in which he delights. I particularly enjoy his room interiors, in which the geometry of forms and his economy of rendering come to the fore.
Whisson’s art has been featured in magazines like International Artist and Australian Artist. He is the author of the instructional book Impressionist Painting Made Easy.
Whisson conducts workshops in Australia and the U.S. There is a video here of one of his workshops at the Tuscon Art Academy, and painter Ed Turpening gives a description of his experiences with a Whisson workshop, including a video demo and a description of Whisson’s approach and materials.
