Distant vistas in the art of Philip Wolfhagen

THE Newcastle Philip Wolfhagen retrospective is a model of what can be achieved by co-operation between galleries.

Journey to the Source IX, by Philip Wolfhagen

IT was a bitter irony for Newcastle Art Gallery that its retrospective of the paintings of Philip Wolfhagen should open the day after the news the NSW government would not provide matching funding for an ambitious expansion of the building - a refusal that means the gallery apparently also will lose funds conditionally approved by the federal government and be unable to proceed with the proposed extensions.

A further irony is that the Art Gallery of NSW has been given a much larger amount than Newcastle requested simply to fund the development phase of its plans for an immense expansion that has yet to be justified by any strategic view of the roles and distinct missions of public museums and galleries in Sydney.

But this is hardly surprising, since most of the people who run arts policy in our country seem to have fallen in line with the twin mantras that bigger is better and contemporary is cool. And the NSW government has further demonstrated its own social and urbanistic vision in the approval of the Barangaroo casino.

It is easier to justify the expansion of Newcastle, which does not have enough space to show its collection and mount an exhibition of any scale at the same time; in fact the whole permanent collection has had to be taken down to accommodate the Wolfhagen show. And Newcastle is one of the few substantial regional galleries in NSW; it would be a logical place to begin a long-term process of developing these smaller galleries into a significant network across the state.

Victoria, as I've said recently, already has an outstanding system of regional galleries, not only showing loan exhibitions from elsewhere but also conceiving, researching and mounting their own, which in turn can tour from one gallery to the other so that the network becomes self-sustaining. The regional galleries of NSW should look to institutions such as Ballarat and Bendigo as benchmarks, and should be supported by the state government to acquire comparable facilities and staff so they too can begin to operate in the same way. The ultimate benefit would be an expanded system in which NSW galleries could take loan exhibitions from Victoria - such as the outstanding Rick Amor: From Study to Painting at Castlemaine, reviewed in these pages a fortnight ago - as well as producing exhibitions that could tour in NSW, Victoria and elsewhere.

The Wolfhagen retrospective itself is a model of what can be achieved by co-operation between galleries, in this case between Newcastle and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, where the exhibition will open later this year, before touring to several other locations across Australia throughout 2014-15. The sharing of resources helps to make possible the investment of time and effort required to gather the many loans entailed by a retrospective, as well as to research and produce the handsome catalogue that accompanies the show.

Wolfhagen, though today an artist of national stature, lives in Tasmania and in the country, close to the landscape that has always been his principal subject. Indeed the earliest paintings in the exhibition are a series of cloud studies inspired by photographs that he made while living in Sydney and far from home. The simplified outlines and deliberately disconnected horizons in the sequence of panels seem to recall some of the early landscapes of Colin McCahon, but it is in the distant, dreamy view and the ambiguous forms of hills and clouds that we recognise characteristics of the artist's mature style.

The essence of Wolfhagen's art - the thing in particular that he has to say that is singular and striking - is in his treatment of distance. He loves to look far away, to that point on a far horizon where the eyes focus on infinity and everything between becomes a vast emptiness. The sensation is one of stillness and silence, akin to the quietness of the mind that is the object of meditation.

This is not an experience commonly encountered in Australia, in part because of the brightness of our sunlight. Anyone returning here from a long stay in Europe will have been struck by the dazzling glare; this is the light that Arthur Streeton and others were celebrated for having first successfully represented in art, but it has deeper consequences for the way we see the world.

Australian light makes us squint as the eye seeks to protect itself from the aggressive brightness; it shortens our depth of focus, makes us look at things close to us, prevents the gaze from releasing into the distance. All of which perhaps could be interpreted as the origin of certain national characteristics; but in any case it helps to explain why we find Wolfhagen's paintings appealing, for they offer us an experience of visual, mental and spiritual openness that is not often available in the Australian natural environment.

The love of distance is also no doubt a reason for Wolfhagen's continued residence in Tasmania, the place where such experience is most easily encountered in nature. It also explains his preference for early morning or twilight, when the light levels are particularly low and when, in addition, the boundary between sky and land becomes vaguer and more indeterminate.

Again, we can see why, at a crucial early phase of his career, the artist was drawn to paint vast open areas of featureless moorland. There was a kind of minimalism in these landscapes, finding just enough material in rocks and scrub to define foreground motifs and thus evoke the sense of space beyond.

In more recent works, Wolfhagen has considered the history of the classical landscape and has introduced more sophisticated compositional devices drawn from this tradition, such as framing trees, to define space and distance in a more articulate manner. In a sense, however, they remain secondary to his main focus on space and depth, as one can see in the way they are represented.

In two adjacent landscapes within the exhibition, two different procedures are visible. In one, the forms of the trees are scratched back into the paint surface, revealing the brown underpainting of the canvas, which serves as the shadow form of branches seen against the light.

In the other case, the trees are lightly painted over the landscape, this time in thin glazes of dark paint, once again achieving the effect of a contre-jour screen, but less dramatically defined. What each of these approaches reveals, however, is the primacy of the painting of space and distance and the subordination of the trees as fundamentally a means to an end. But this also shows up the weak point in these pictures, which is that the trees have not really been studied for their own sake; they have not been given the attention they deserve as central, rather than incidental, elements in a landscape painting.

Part of the explanation may lie in Wolfhagen's use of photography. He makes no secret of this and, indeed, several photographs are included in a display case for comparison with finished works. Any landscape painter today will use photographs as part of their reference material, but they are no substitute for drawing and sketching from life in gouache or other portable materials. And all these resources ultimately should be subordinate to memory and imagination.

Wolfhagen's least successful works, not surprisingly, are those that have been most reliant on photography, such as the series of seascapes that, in principle, could have worked as another expression of infinite distance but end up as frozen images of a reality that is in constant flux and that loses all its vitality when its motion is arrested.

It seems to be photography that accounts for the relative weakness of the trees, too, by providing too easy a solution to them, since they appear to be simply copied or reproduced from the photographs of actual scrubby trees that the artist has found to hand. One has to wonder whether there can be any development in this direction without a new consideration of trees as subjects in their own right.

Interestingly, the exhibition of Wolfhagen's new work at Dominik Mersch's gallery in Sydney comprises paintings that are done solely from memory of light and colour and, for the first time, without any photographic references. The result is a series that has become more abstract, lacking the definition of trees or any specific topographical features; but without such specificity - real or imaginary - hills, horizons and skies risk becoming little more than bands of colour. There is a danger of drifting into the merely decorative, and it is hard to see that there is anywhere to go from this point.

Wolfhagen himself must instinctively sense this danger, for he has not painted any of these pictures on his usual enormous scale but instead made smaller vertical panels that are being presented as suites. Whether this makes the work more or less effective is debatable; what certainly is unfortunate is that these colourful but rather bland new works are shown next to some huge cloudscapes and a series of fine lithographs in his more classical manner. The result is confusing to the viewer, and at the same time a reminder that Wolfhagen's reputation is based on works that are considerably more articulate.

The differences in scale in this show are not only striking in themselves but raise more general problems. It is clear, for example, that Wolfhagen is just as able to convey a sense of depth and space in a small lithograph as in a massive oil painting.

In the Newcastle retrospective, too, even as one admired the serene, almost spiritual depth that is really at the heart of his inspiration as an artist, one couldn't help wondering why these pictures were so big, and best indeed when seen from far away.

Ultimately, this has to be understood as a response - like the unconscious adaptation of animal species - to the particular environment of art today.

Paintings have grown in size during the past generation or more because of changes in the spaces in which they are shown: as commercial galleries have become ever bigger, sparer and more cavernous, pictures have had to expand to make an impression and to justify the ever higher prices that are an implicit, if specious, assurance of value.

Equally important, the public gallery or museum increasingly is assumed to be the ultimate destination for significant art, and these too - as we know all too well - are on an inexorable path of inflationary expansion. In turn, such institutions train audiences to look at art superficially, briefly and from a distance, not closely, slowly and intimately. For anyone trying, like Wolfhagen, to evoke an experience of stillness and peace, survival in this world is inevitably a balancing act.

Illumination: The Art of Philip Wolfhagen
Newcastle Art Gallery, to August 11

Wolfhagen - Propositions
Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney, to August 3