Philip Wolfhagen in 2025

Hallucinations
12.06. - 12.07.2025

Philip Wolfhagen is one of Australia’s leading contemporary landscape painters. His work, often seeking to transpose the oil sketches of John Constable into a contemporary idiom, captures the timeless emotional resonance of familiar landscapes and transforms them into a visual experience that impresses deeply in our minds. The artist’s material approach is uniquely physical in the dense application of beeswax mixed with oils and reflects a deeply experienced, enduring engagement with an ancient, yet eternally living, subject matter.

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ARTIST STATEMENT 

“This year, more than any time in the past 35 years of working to exhibition deadlines, I have had to work myself into an adrenaline induced delirium to bring the paintings into being. It is difficult to describe the state of mind necessary to do good work, and especially to progress ideas. Perhaps it is fear of failure that produces the adrenaline, but it seems necessary to find solutions, to see past the impasses that have obstructed forward progression.

One thing is for sure, the conditions for good art making are difficult. It requires conviction (to start with) and to hold your nerve as you engage in the struggle. But at the end, there should be no evidence of there having been any struggle.

The paintings in this show follow directly on from my last exhibition ’Premonitions’, including the series of ‘Shepherd’s warnings’, which looked at cloud motifs as signals for future events. In this series I have switched to portrait format and allowed myself more freedom in the paint handling.  I have really enjoyed the softer effects the brush can achieve, and hope the joy comes through.

This body of work also continues my research into colour perception, particularly the threshold between photopic and scotopic vision that occurs at dawn and dusk. It is mainly the latter that excites me, as we lose our colour perception and gain tonal acuity. I will never tire of this exciting time of the day.

Colour is another driving force behind the paintings, as I investigate the possibilities of my five-colour palette – the three primaries and two violets.

As I slowly recover my rational senses following the intensity of the engagement of painting, I will begin to see these paintings more objectively. I am not entirely sure what they mean, but I felt absolute certainty at the moment of their execution. I was compelled to paint them.”