PROVENANCE:
Purchased by Mr Jack Ferrier, along with the remaining seventeen paintings in the original exhibition at Barry Lett Galleries 1965 Private Collection, Auckland Fine Paintings, Jewellery & Decorative Arts, Webb's 19/09/2006, Lot No. 59

EXHIBITED
Illingworth: An Exhibition of Recent Work, Barry Lett Galleries, Auckland 1-12 November 1965

REFERENCE
A Tourist in Paradise Lost: The Art of Michael Illingworth, Kevin Ireland, Aaron Lister and Damian Skinner, City Gallery, Wellington, 2001, p. 52. Collector buys Seventeen Paintings by One Artist, New Zealand Herald, 23 May 1967

Stylistically, Illingworth's figures are instantly recognisable. The shape of my heads I take from that which nature has drafted as the shape strongest for protection (seen in such as an egg). My bodies come from the pyramid. The head I make is often to act as a canopy against nuclear fallout. The pyramid seems a sensible fallout shelter also. p. 22 Aaron Lister and Damian Skinner, A Tourist in Paradise Lost: The Art of Michael Illingworth, City Gallery Wellington, 2001.

Illingworth's figures often developed into specific characters that came to frequent his paintings. The Piss-Quicks began to appear in Illingworth's paintings in the early 1960s. Thomas Piss-Quick was said to have represented the type of man that Illingworth had observed while in London. Such men would move quickly through art exhibitions, barely glancing at the art on view, before asking directions to the toilet. This combination of money and attire suggest wealth, but not necessarily fine taste or a discerning eye.

The idea of critical vision is central to Illingworth's projected artistic identity, continually rehearsed in notions of seeing through the façade of civilisation, or identifying the extraordinary and poetic in nature. On another level, the eye, and its gaze, is fundamental to the meanings produced within Illingworth's paintings, since seeing, or its lack, characterises much of the social dysfunction Illingworth describes through the Piss-Quicks with their vacuous stares and blank faces.