Fred Cress : Whispers. Drawings 1958 - 2007 by MCGREGOR, Ken

Melbourne : Macmillan, 2007. Quarto, purple lettered black cloth in illustrated dustjacket, pp. 255, extensively illustrated. New copy of an out of print title. Fred Cress is a Sydney artist who divides his time between Australia and rural France, where he maintains a second studio. He is a keen student of human nature. While his quizzical gaze detects the subjects - those who flirt, chase, dance, banquet and otherwise engage in the whole gamut of human affairs - his drawing skills, honed over five decades, provide the means of recording them on paper or canvas. This book is about drawing, and about the artist's use of drawing to capture multiple nuances of human behaviour. Cress is an Australian artist who subscribes to the tradition of artists like Rembrandt and Goya who sought to express aspects of the human condition as they saw it in their times. The more than 900 drawings reproduced in this book are arranged in series which date from the 1950s to the present.