Philip Wolfhagen: Fields of Vision

For over two decades, Tasmanian painter Philip Wolfhagen has gazed upon the expansive farmland surrounding his studio in the picturesque rural town of Longford. With the hazy outline of the Great Western Tiers tucked into the distant horizon, it is a view that has appeared in his paintings many times over.

Maintaining a successful art practice that has encompassed more than 45 solo exhibitions across three decades (including the 2013 nationally touring survey, Illumination: the art of Philip Wolfhagen), Wolfhagen is a master of painting light and atmosphere. Possessing a style often compared to nineteenth-century British painter John Constable, Wolfhagen works with oil paint and beeswax, incorporating a palette he calls “spectral with three primaries and a couple of violets.” Every day he walks the fields with his beloved dog Elsie, taking in the view and occasionally stopping to take a reference photo for a future artwork. Looking at any of Wolfhagen’s paintings, one can almost feel the crisp air rising from the landscape – a skill that no doubt contributed to his work, Winter nocturne IV, being awarded the Wynne Art Prize in 2007.

The brief moments of shifting light that occur between night and day are a hallmark of Wolfhagen’s practice, as he explains. “At this moment, there is a wonderful tonal weight to everything because you’re no longer distracted by colour.” It is a time of muted transformation, where the landscape seems to change as the eye adjusts to the dimming light. It happens quickly and Wolfhagen is an expert at depicting it on canvas. “All of my works are crepuscular, they’re very much about last light or early morning,” he says. “It carries on from my long-term obsession with the shift between photopic and scotopic vision.” Beyond the scientific, he admits there is also a search for meaning. “Since I’ve taken on farming in the last few years, I’ve started to identify with all these classical ideas we have about looking to the sky for answers. Culturally, we’ve always tended to look for meaning in nature.”

On occasion, elements of the greater world influence how Wolfhagen depicts the landscape. In 2024, his Premonitions series featured clusters of grey-tinged clouds hovering in tense configurations over the landscape. A contrast to the sweeping white clouds he has become known for, the Premonitions works loosely referenced the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “These paintings were more constructed than ever before. Rather than depicting natural-looking scenery, they are emotionally intense paintings. The clouds are dream-like and not necessarily natural, although they are always based on observations of nature.”

In his recent Shepherd’s Warning series, Wolfhagen again incorporates a darker palette, reflecting the looming presence of global political unrest and climate change concerns. Distant fires burn, yet hope remains. The soft pink light blushing through the centre of the paintings hints at the inevitable coming of a new day. Working on a smaller scale has also allowed Wolfhagen to embrace more softness and spontaneity. “My mark-making on a small canvas is more abstract. I think I’ve always wanted to be looser in my work. In my larger paintings, I tend to tighten up and that makes the marks more managed.”

In addition to his current painting practice, Wolfhagen spends much of his time growing fodder crops – oats and turnips – for the sheep he has been breeding for more than 25 years. Time in the studio is now harder to come by, but the trade-off is a deeper understanding of the rhythms of nature. Reading and music also offer inspiration, and he reveals this past year has been spent reading John Steinbeck novels, while chamber music continues to be a frequent choice in the studio.

“Creating art is like listening to a composer, they all have favourite chords that echo through their work,” he says. “Every artist reiterates the things that are significant to them. There is an obsessive nature to what I paint. I don’t know whether it’s a strength or a weakness, but it’s certainly a feeling of personal conviction.”