On the one hand there is the meandering subjectivity of the Aboriginal hunter-gatherer, where focal length slides with attention from one food source or landmark to another, where the meaning of the visible earth shifts continually from the dimension of immediate perception or physical need to that of mythical and historical story and associated obligation. Against such spatial, temporal and socio-spiritual nomadism, the colonisers' representations seem stiffly, even brutally objective, constrained by the singularity of viewpoint or trig point or compass reading, and by the formal geometries of perspective and cartography. From this 'imperial gaze' comes the apparatus of occupation: the survey, the map, the leasehold and the fenceline.

This general analysis has become something of a truism, an article of faith in postcolonial theory. Moreover, images of the land often serve as a focus for Australian artists who seek to reconcile (or at least to compare and contrast) Aboriginal and settler cultures; artists as diverse as Gordon Bennett, Tim Johnson, Narelle Jubelin, Leah King-Smith, Ann Newmarch, Geoff Parr, Imants Tillers and John Wolseley.

In the Western, European approach to landscape, the scope of the vision is that of a plaster-gilt frame, a proscenium arch, a stage for heroic action, for divine epiphany, for economic productivity. The place of making and the image made are connected, but there is no necessary simultaneity. The world, the earth is abstracted before it is depicted, even before it is seen.

Wolfhagen necessarily and cheerfully bears the historical and ideological weight of this tradition. Indeed, the progress of his art recapitulates landscape's own history. In a series of early (1988) grisailles in the manner of convict artist W B Gould, he includes window frame views beside the dead hare and vegetables, just as early Flemish landscape begins through Gothic arches behind the Virgin and donors. Drawn into the glazed and four-square atmosphere, Wolfhagen began painting clouds.

Not only do these 1989 skyscapes test perception and technique against luminous evanescence, but they also extend the compass of the painter's vision. Their simultaneous breadth and immediacy admit the Sublime, that Romantic yearning for

'... something ... Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit ...'1

which is to be found in Constable's oil sketches, Turner's 'colour beginnings', in the Tasmanian surveyor and painter W C Piguenit's pink-gold mountains and clouds.

In the mature Central Highlands landscapes and East Coast seascapes of the late 1990s, the artist alludes to a different Sublime, a Formalesque Sublime, where the natural subject is subordinated to the drama of chromo-tonal construction and expressive surface. This self-referential, modernist sublimity is also (more subtly, but ultimately more strongly) expressed by the edges of the canvas. Wolfhagen has said that the most difficult decisions are the first ones, the ones about size and format. There is geometry hidden by his veils of mist. The continuous panorama has become the sliced-up and endlessly reconfigurable myriorama, and the effect of the work now resides in the carefully determined dimensions and proportions of each individual rectangle of canvas, in the tension of difference and distance between the panels of a diptych, even in the harmonious arrangement of works within an exhibition installation.

The spacing of the polyptych panels, the close abutment of related visual fields, probably owes something to Wolfhagen's experience painting the apse in the Devonport Gallery (a converted Baptist church) in 1993. Compressing a panoramic vision into a series of wedges corresponding to the gores of the dome was an exercise in cartography, in framing and editing and the importance of margins.

There have been other geometrical conditioning factors, too. The split image is a not uncommon habit in etchers and lithographers constrained by the size of a plate or stone; Wolfhagen initially trained as a printmaker. The 5 x 4 inch cards he used in early landscape sketches produced a golden section rectangle when folded in half, and he has since continued to work with golden section proportional relationships within and between canvases. There is something of Barnett Newman's 'zip' paintings, something more of Colin McCahon, particularly Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury. Closer to home, the Monier factory in Longford, near the artist's home, has a roadside display of coloured tiles in vertical bands, in Wolfhagen's palette: burnt sienna, Indian red, cobalt blue, raw umber, terre verte. The gap of a diptych is like the gutter shadow of an open book.

Perhaps most obviously, certainly most traditionally, there is his use of the grid. From the Gould pastiches to the current photo-graphic transcriptions Wolfhagen has relied on the authority of rectilinearity, squaring up his canvases, systematically transferring visual goods, occupying vacant visual territory.

But he is a short-sighted surveyor. The Central Highlands landscapes with their vast, lumpy expanses of buttongrass and dolorite have a sensory spread, an 'all-overness' to them which swamps any sense of territorial claim, or even of locational certainty. Likewise (even more so) does the recent 'Surface Tension' sequence of seascapes deny to viewers the possibility of obtaining a meaningful spatial purchase on the scene spread out before them. Everything is mobile, slippery, blurred, elusive. For all that, the fat knife-spreads of pigmented wax have a distinct (and delicious) materiality in and of themselves, within the picture as a whole they are not forms so much as lines of visual thought, stretched-out low-tech pixels. A grammar, not a vocabulary. Description separated from its subject. Painting, neither more nor less.

It is true that both these series of works hold on to the horizon line and thereby to the sense of destination, of coming conquest or of vanishing which is common to Renaissance perspectivists and imperial explorers as well as to self-challenging bushwalkers and yachties. But in the latest 'still lifes' even this last, vestigial marker disappears; the vertical hold goes entirely. The imperial subject is generally supposed to stand on, not in the land. He makes his claims against the claims of earth. He subdues it. For Wolfhagen, on the other hand, conquest is ambiguous, reciprocal. Looking across the gold-dry, irrigation-dry Tasmanian Midlands, looking up at the crisp, blue-grey pleats of the Western Tiers, walking and fishing in the wet white clouds up the Ouse and around the Lakes, digging in the productive vegetable garden at home (his half-spoken answer to Monet's Giverny), the artist is as much in as on. The clods of earth and rotting mulch of the garden beds beneath his feet are re-visioned in the clumps of turf and blotting squelch of his paintings of the high country.

Wolfhagen has often seen or felt a visual equivalence between the macro and the micro, between the vast geological forms and spaces of Tasmanian mountain landscape and the tiny plant ecologies found on a single rock. These latest vertical triptychs are developed from close-ups of trunks and limbs of cider gums Eucalyptus gunnii, the striped and dappled skin of the tree rippling smoothly down the picture plane. Curiously, though, the panels are executed with the canvas on its side, in the artist's habitual manner: horizontal stroke 'handwriting' left to right, top to bottom (to prevent smudging). Painted thus on the horizontal, these panels are of landscape. They sing in close harmony with the panoramas. Turned through ninety degrees and partnered with other vegetal patternscapes they are in landscape.

Wolfhagen was born in the Isis valley, near Ross. He knows this country from its beginning in his beginning. Wolfhagens have been in Tasmania since the 1870s; no time by indigenous standards perhaps, but a very long time for any non-Aboriginal Australian. Family stories connect people and places, from a Derwent valley farm to a Hobart solicitor's office to a holiday shack at the beach; the artist's ritual walking trips often involve the companionship of one or more of his three brothers. There are even hints of delving further back, in that peculiarly Tasmanian obsession with the weird oppression of early colonial life. Wolfhagen owns a treasured heirloom: a set of ten centimetre high carved figures of Aborigines, soldiers and settlers, copied from those in Governor Arthur's famous proclamation boards. The surface of grandfather Charles's Huon pine caricatures is chiselled into a negative reptile skin, recalling (or rather predicting) grandson Philip's whittling of the two-dimensional surface, the concave spreads and drags of his paint strokes.

Recalibrated, re-scaled, the settler grid maps and claims the chaotic, organic spread of the indigenous rhizome, making its claim through the fingermarks of the palette knife blade.

This is Liawenee, Turrana, Devil's Den, and it is no place.

This ridge of beeswax that catches the light, that catches the eye; is it a knot in a peel of bark? Is it the edge of a sunrise cloud? Is it a shelf of lichen on a granite boulder? Is it the contour line on a map?

Where is your country? Do you know your way home?

David Hansen
Hobart, January 2000