Four Tasmanian Painters - Burns, Keeling, Wastell & Wolfhagen

3 July to 16 August 2009
Holmes à Court Gallery, Perth WA

How to begin? The obvious thing to say is that these four artists from Tasmania are all, in their own individual ways, taking their cue from the local landscape. But I can sense you nodding off already. It’s not necessarily untrue, of course, but nor is it particularly helpful: on the one hand just too obvious and, on the other, too evasive.

For one thing, ‘landscape’, as George Seddon has pointed out, is a perceptual term, not an objective reality. Your landscape is not necessarily mine. Perhaps the landscape, for you, is rolling hills with cattle grazing peacefully under scudding clouds – the pastoral idyll of Streeton, Roberts and Lawson that glorifies rural labour. Or, with Drysdale and Mary Durack in mind, you might think of harsh, sun-drenched plains dotted with saltbush – the ‘real’ Australia, as it is sometimes misleadingly called. Perhaps, on the contrary, your landscape is one of lofty forested mountains shrouded in mist: the impenetrable wilderness of the Romantics and the tourist brochures.

However we conceive of it, we must, if we are honest, acknowledge that the landscape is not just a matter of what is seen or experienced. Its emotional impact depends on recollections, myths, and cultural experiences filtered through art, music and poetry. Nolan acknowledged as much when he fused his Ned Kelly into the plains of Northern Victoria, and Banjo Paterson in his mythologising of the mountain stockman.

So let’s not think of these paintings as landscapes but instead as observations of the human condition. They scrutinise the various ways we inhabit, and indeed construct, the environments around us.

Philip Wolfhagen and David Keeling begin with careful observation of specific places they know well, which they transform, while Tim Burns and Richard Wastell create imaginative (although not necessarily imaginary) places.

Philip’s paintings represent both a homecoming and an estrangement. As well as travelling to wild unpeopled places, as he has always done, he now finds a parallel subject in the view from his own garden in Northern Tasmania, recording it with a disarming straightforwardness. The unabashed pictorialism of these works might come as a bit of a shock to those accustomed to self-referentiality and artifice.

Not only is he now ‘working from home’, as it were, but he is cultivating the roots of the European landscape tradition, for so long neglected, to see how they might respond to some judicious fertilising. Like Corot, he adapts the classical landscape to express his deep, spontaneous love for the countryside without idealising it as a place of escape from the banality of city life.

The impact of European culture on Tasmania’s land and people has always been Philip’s subject, but the contrast is brought home with particular complexity in those paintings where pastoral country is seen through the cultivated enclave of the garden, where one enclosure opens onto another, so the landscape is ‘both itself and its own echo’, as the Irish dramatist Brian Friel once wrote.

Tim Burns’s approach is at once more direct and more abstract. He begins with pure sensations – the play of light on water, the movement of foliage against the sky, contrasts of colour and texture and so on – which he distills into richly patterned tapestries, much in the way a musician produces a composition from tones, harmonies and intervals.

Tim builds his compositions intuitively, layer by layer, with only a broad idea of where they might be taking him. Starting with the lightest tones and broadest patternings, he gradually progresses towards richer, darker colours and finer detail.

The wonder is that he seems to know exactly when to stop. In the Henty River Suite, for instance, his touch is light and elegantly simple, resulting in a spare geometric formality, while in the bravura River Garden and From the Bridge (Vuillard’s Garden) it’s as if he has sunk into reverie, continuing to layer until a fabulously enchanted world has been brought into being. It might be hard to believe, at first, that these two distinctive approaches are the products of the one artist, until you notice that they are comprised of common elements, the foundation being a patchwork of short, square brushstrokes suggesting (without directly depicting) the play of sunlight on water.

Of all the works in this exhibition, Richard Wastell’s would seem to lend themselves most readily to social or political readings, especially in light of earlier works of his that explicitly dealt with the clear-felling of Tasmania’s native forests. This is not an approach he is entirely comfortable with, however, preferring (quite rightly) to emphasise their poetic and allusive qualities. They arise from the merging of diverse experiences and observations into suggestive, if not wholly fathomable, narratives.

Richard’s natural tendency towards lyricism is perhaps most clearly evident in Abalone, with its combination of gentle surrealism and monumentality. It has all the rhythmic qualities of dance. One thinks of the English artist, Paul Nash, whom Richard admires, or even William Blake. Like theirs, his is a metaphysical, even mystical, vision of the world: silent, melancholy and haunted by death, yet animated by the prospect of renewal.

Richard shows us landscapes so shaped by human hands that they can hardly be thought of as natural at all. He gives the disturbing impression that we have arrived too late to witness some important event, whose significance we can’t be entirely sure of: the calm after the storm. Rebirth is suggested by the delight he takes in every tiny detail and by the confident classicism of his compositions (what else is suggested by those monolithic middens of mussel shells but the triumph of life over death?)

All these artists judiciously skirt around or avoid the wilderness – that enduring cliché of Tasmanian environmentalism -but none seem so emphatically contra-wilderness as David Keeling. For one thing, he concentrates on coastal scrub and dry heathland, the kind of rough, scrappy vegetation that could never excite the imagination of the awe-struck romantic. For another, he places us in the thick of it, with few external points of reference. So even when his paintings are large in size, they are intimate in scale. These are thoroughly peopled landscapes, including those that do not include actual figures.

David is interested in details – the particular points of contact between the viewer and the viewed - not in the broad vista. It is from the details that understanding comes. And, against expectation, his palette is warm and high-keyed. We are thrust out of the evening gloom into the heat of the day. You can almost hear the cicadas singing.

Nevertheless, melancholy persists. There is a thinness, a brittleness, an eerie stillness to these places that suggests, not vacancy exactly, but a sort of transience, a fading to white. The child with his bike and the Asian tourists looking for photo opportunities share a disturbing lightness of attachment. They seem hardly aware of the environment they inhabit so precariously, let alone being capable of meaningful interaction with it. The wilderness, it would seem, is inside them.

The poet Robert Frost once caustically observed that people at the beach always sit gazing out to the empty ocean because it reflects the emptiness inside themselves and their inability to connect with one another. Perhaps the same can be said about our preoccupation with the unpopulated, ‘pristine’ landscape. If these four artists have anything in common (and, to be frank, their differences are more interesting than their similarities), it is their urge to reconnect us, to remind us that the landscape is always something we form in our own image, and that forms us in turn. That realisation is the essential prelude to action. Everything else is just scenery.

Peter Timms, June 2009