Ernest Sidney Philpot (1906-1985) was born in England  and migrated with his family to Western Australia in 1913.    In 1929 he married Edith Eileen Carter and he studied at the Melbourne National Gallery School of Art in 1937.  A painter, teacher, writer and critic, he was a member   of the Australian Division of the International Association of Art Critics. 

 

One-man exhibitions of Philpot’s work have been shown in the Commonwealth Institute Gallery of London (1960) and the Federation of British Artists Gallery (1966).  Other exhibitions in which his work has been shown include ‘Western Australian Art and Artists (1900-1950)’ and many privately assembled exhibitions of his work over the years.  He was president of the Perth Society of Artists (1950-1953) and the art critic for the Sunday Times (1960-1965) and won a number of prizes including the Claude Hotchin 1949 landscape prize and the Perth Prize in 1952.  Philpot’s earlier works from 1934 to 1954 are mainly still life, landscape and figurative and most are worked in oils with only a few watercolours.

 

Some of his paintings are included in the publication of Western Australian Art (a selection of works from the Robert Holmes a’ Court collection edited by Roderick Anderson) and many of his paintings hang in Perth’s public buildings.  These include the Royal Perth Hospital, The Queen Elizabeth Medical Centre, the University of Western Australia and regional art galleries.  The Art Gallery of Western Australia owns several of his paintings and two are owned by the National Gallery, Canberra. 

 

After 1954 his increasing absorption in abstract expressionism became clearly evident in the paintings he created.  In the years before his death in 1985 he was writing his memoirs within a manuscript outlining his personal views on the newest developments in modern art and the reasons for his conversion to abstract painting.  These are revealed in the book I am the Artist, in which many of his paintings have been illustrated and the text of which has been edited by his daughter and publisher Valerie Fitch in October 2008.