Visual games
Laura Gascoigne
Lying about on the surface of Anthony Whishaw's Bethnal Green studio during his open day last month were some hand-tinted etchings from 1997. One showed an open Filofax, its glinting metal clips and their hooped shadows so realistically drawn you could almost hear them snap and, meeting across the join of its two pages, a flood of jumbled letters, numbers and symbols: an image of thought. The proper province of philosophy and neuroscience, thought is not something most painters try to depict. Empty heads are more their traditional territory: vacant skulls as subjects
for vanitas paintings. But Whishaw likes his heads full, and buzzing with thoughts. Unlike Ecclesiastes, he doesn't find the transient world to be full of vanity — his world is an endless river of perceptual data into which, as an artist, he can never step twice.
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