What Artists See is a luminous collection of essays on art, obsession and creativity from one of Australia’s best critics, Quentin Sprague.
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 of discipline and will?
The twelve essays in this collection offer glimpses into the lives of some of Australia’s best contemporary artists, exploring the impetus for creativity and the role of art in making meaning.
Tied together by an enduring curiosity for how artists practice – what motivates them, what confounds them and what compels them to keep creating – these pieces span the islands of Carpentaria to suburban Perth, the streets of Malaysia to the deserts of the Northern Territory.
What emerges is art as an act of wilful vision – of alternative ways of seeing that illuminate the otherwise invisible.
“It’s about the process of reaching, holding and reaching again that propels an artist’s practice – the pattern that ideally sustains them, and takes them forward. How they do it varies from practice to practice, sometimes radically, but there is nonetheless a common ground: it is formed by the interlinked acts of looking and seeing, acts the vast majority of us perform without a second thought but which for artists must be undertaken with a kind of concentrated attention and care.” (From the foreword)
“Quentin Sprague’s essays are a tonic – a series of sustained, richly detailed and deeply thoughtful encounters with art and the people who make it.” – Justin Paton, Art Gallery of NSW
Quentin Sprague is the author of The Stranger Artist, which won the 2021 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction, and a monograph on the late Australian painter Ken Whisson.
His art criticism appears widely, including regularly in The Monthly, as well as in monographs and exhibition catalogues published by the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
Sprague has worked variously as a curator, an academic, an art coordinator and an artist, and lives in Canberra, on Ngunnawal Country.
What Artists See: Essays is published by Monash University Publishing and is available from leading book retailers.
Image: What Artists See: Essays – courtesy of Monash University Publishing