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Peter Timms
Philip Wolfhagen: Surface Tensions
A Tasmanian Monograph
Quintus Publishing 2007
224 x 204mm, hardcover, 64 pp
$39.95 rrp

Philip Wolfhagen is prominent among a new generation of artists reinventing the traditions of Australian landscape painting.  Drawing on a surprisingly wide range of predecessors – from Cézanne to the convict painter William Buelow Gould – Wolfhagen skilfully evokes the bleak, romantic beauty of the Tasmanian high plains, an environment that he has known since childhood and has come to love.

Through all his work run the themes of human responsibilities to the natural world; memory and forgetfulness; change and continuity; and the relentless passages of time.  His paintings reward careful examination, suggesting much about how we might respond to the idea of nature in the twenty-first century.

Peter Timms was born and educated in Melbourne and has held various curatorial positions in Australian public art galleries and museums since the early 1970s.  During the 1990s he was art critic for The Age and the editor of Art Monthly Australia.  He now lives in Hobart where he is Tasmanian art critic for The Australian and writes regularly for publications both in Australia and overseas.