About Ishbel
Oskar Kokoschka wrote in her first catalogue:
“I see my pupil Ishbel McWhirter moved by curiosity...she pictures her heroines with a serene remoteness, lovely restraint, and the strangeness of the designers of the white funeral vases of ancient Greece.”
Ishbel was born in London, the daughter of a Welsh mother and a Scottish father and spent her childhood in North Wales, later attending A.S. Neill’s progressive boarding school Summerhill. Coincidentally the school evacuated to North Wales, and it was Neill who first recognised and encouraged her talent. At a Summerhill exhibition held at the Arcade Gallery in London, Ishbel was ‘discovered’ and hailed by the BBC as a rising star. The following year at the age of eighteen she held her first one-person exhibition. Her work came to the attention of the great Viennese artist Oskar Kokoschka, who invited her to become his pupil in London.
An excerpt from the V & A museum catalogue describing her portrait of A. S. Neill succinctly summarises the two formative influences on her life:
“The A.S. Neill in this context represents an act of double homage by the pupil, to two of the most lively and liberating influences at work in their different ways in post-war British society.”
In a profile of Ishbel for Nimbus magazine, Bryan Robertson describes her as:
“... a draughtsman, a poet, a recorder of familiar scenes and a social commentator. But she is an artist first and foremost, although her humanism is an integral part of her artist’s world. As an artist, (she) has magnificent technical ability and the power to create the act of revelation which illuminates any aspect of life that she may have recorded: to simplify, to transcend and fix upon the page, uniquely and startlingly, a statement which uses a highly sophisticated pictorial language based upon form, line and structure.”
In 1990 as a tribute to her talent and debt to Kokoschka’s encouragement a loan retrospective was held in Pochlarn outside Vienna, the birthplace of Kokoschka.
She paints in Hampstead and in her Anglesey studio overlooking the Menai Straits and Snowdonia, a panorama that has fascinated and inspired her recent work.
Alfred Marnau, the poet and lifelong friend of Kokoschka describes what he saw as the root of her talents:
“The child’s unerring, uncorruptible eye (that) was hers from the beginning and is with her still.”