Tasmanian Times

The Peaceable Kingdom 1989, oil on board, tryptych

Tasmanian Story 1994, acrylic on canvas

THE art of Alex Wanders is a deeply religious art. Born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1960 of Dutch migrants who migrated to Tasmania from Emmen, Dreuthi on the north east of Holland in the 1950s, Wanders makes recurring use of Biblical themes in his paintings as he seeks to express aspects of his Christian faith through the medium of painting and uses landscapes as his vehicle to do this. He has made use of the triptych format in a number of his paintings because of its historical association with Christianity and because the combining of the panels to produce one image suggest the unity of the Trinity. Other influences on his art include the Flemish landscapists and the art of Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917) from whom Wanders derives ideas for the mood, atmosphere, light and scale of his paintings. But his highly symbolic and, at times, highly repetitive art is more than just simply illustration of the Bible. For Wanders is also in love with the art of painting and wants to arouse in us the receptivity, awe and immanence present in his art.

From 1987 to 1988 Wanders undertook a Master of Fine Arts thesis at the Hunter Street campus of the Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania where he was asked to do two substantial papers as part of his thesis programme. He did one of these papers on Christian art, looking specifically at the writings of H. R. Rookmaaker, and the other on the iconography of Jonah, beginning these papers with the following quotation from the New Testament:

You, however, must remain faithful in what you have learned and are convinced of, aware from whom you have learned, and how from childhood you have known the sacred Scriptures that are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.
11 Timothy 3:14-15.

The books of Rookmaaker, who was Professor of the History of Art at the Free University of Amsterdam until his death in 1977, and Calvin Seerveld, a Christian writer on aesthetics, have influenced Wanders’s art as have the writings of Dr Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), who founded the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880, was Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905, and whose works include his Lectures on Calvinism, and the works of Francis A. Schaeffer that have been collected together under the title The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, and include Pollution and the Death of Man (1970) and A Christian View of the West (1982).

Rookmaaker believes history ‘is the work of Christ, the Lord of history, and it unfolds itself because he acts within and into it.’ Man has ‘to activate and realize, to discover and give form to the world’s inherent potential.’ Rookmaaker sees the role of ‘the children of God’, ‘along with the rest of mankind, is to work towards the unfolding and realization of’ the ‘world’s potential.’ Nothing can be accomplished ‘without a continual battle against evil.’ Technological developments have been accompanied by the ‘inner decay’ of society, ‘a growing number of dictators, endless abuse of power’ by states and ‘vast international companies, which are demonic in their anonymous greed, their uncontrollable activities for which no one seems to be responsible.’ ‘Christians are called to be the salt of the earth, to preserve and add flavour to what is good, and to bring a measure of healing where man is sick and broken.’ They have ‘to work concretely for peace and freedom’, to ‘act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with [our] God’ (Micah 6:8). An artist needs to make beautiful art or ‘his art will become a strange phenomenon remote from reality—something almost unknown in history apart from modern art.’ ‘There are no shortcuts to the ‘road to complete fulfillment of the goals of creation’. The ‘process which leads ... to eternal life’ is ‘a way of obedience, marked by love, freedom, truth, justice, and beauty.’

Similarily, Seerveld believes that, as the times become more grim, ‘our steadfast joy in the Lord’s merciful Rule, as it encompasses our long-range tasks, will be the kind of unnerving witness Paul commends to those who bear the name of Christ, in order to make many more jealous of the faith we have received as a gift to grow on’. Some of Wanders’s artworks are structured in what Seerveld describes as ‘a christian tin-can model of the human creature’ where qualities human beings embody, such as piety, friendliness, loyalty, thriftiness, mixing with others, thought, speech, imaginativity, skills, feelings, and health, spiral around, in concentric circles, the Holy Spirit in one’s heart.

Wanders believes, as Abraham Kuyper wrote in The Calvinistic Concept of Culture, in a note that Wanders pinned to the wall of his studio, that art ‘has the mystical task of reminding us in its productions of the beautiful that was lost and of anticipating its perfect coming luster.’

The second part of Wanders’s Masters thesis was devoted to the art of Pinkham Ryder especially in connection with the way in which the story of Jonah and the Whale has been expressed in the history of Western art. Wanders admires Ryder’s art for the way his images address such images as ‘man’s dignity, the meaningfulness of human action and history, the possibility of sacrificial love and God’s presence in the world’, and also how ‘the helplessness of the hero and the controlling benevolence of God’ are features ‘quite typical of Ryder’s work’, an influence that can be seen in Wanders’s Another Jonah (1989, oil on board, 28 x 27 cms). It is not surprising, in an age of excessive materialism and consumerism, that Ryder’s beliefs are not popular with some writers on art. ‘Fact did not interest’ Ryder, ‘truth and beauty did.’ ‘The artist’, Ryder stated:

should fear to become the slave of detail. He should strive to express his thought and not the surface of it…. The artist has only to remain true to his dream and ... must see nought but the vision beyond. ‘Have’, Ryder wrote, ‘you ever seen an inch worm climb up a leaf or twig, and there clinging to the very end, revolve in the air, feeling for something to reach something? That’s like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing.’

Ryder’s ‘faith in God’ carried ‘him through the trials of being an artist, little recognized by his contemporaries and praised only by a few who who understood and valued his contribution.’

Born in 1847 Ryder lived as a recluse in New York. His pictures ‘reflect a rich inner life, with a haunting love of the sea, and a constant search to express the ineffable.’ Jackson Pollock admired Ryder, who was a friend of the mystic, poet and painter Kahlil Gibran, author of The Prophet, as ‘the only American master who interests me.’ In writing on Ryder’s art in April 1880 in the New York Tribune, Charles Cook, Charles C. Eldridge states, ‘perceptively linked’ Ryder ‘to the imaginative tradition of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and William Blake and claimed that “in its own way, the work he has produced thus far is as sweet, as natural, and as innocently wise as theirs.”’

Ryder stated of Nature that it ‘is a teacher who never deceives. When I grew weary with the futile struggle to imitate the canvases of the past’, he said, ‘I went out into the fields, determined to serve nature as faithfully as I had served art. In my desire to become accurate I became lost in a maze of detail’. Critical of his work compared with nature, a scene ‘stood out’ to him ‘like a painted canvas’ where ‘there was no detail to vex the eye.’ As he worked he ‘saw nature springing into life upon’ his ‘dead canvas. It was better than nature, for it was vibrating with the thrill of a new creation.’ Ryder was esteemed because of his separation from the mainstream of perceptual art, and was ‘the centerpiece of the Imaginative Range, within which is the mother lode American painters — visionaries, fantasts, and Symbolists — mined at the turn of the century.’ Symbolist aesthetics reflected the ‘primacy of spirit, soul or imagination over both the realist’s dictionary of natural phenomenon and the aesthete’s manipulation of form without content.’ The Symbolist’s ‘tendency toward subjectivity and introspection often led to personal and enigmatic visions and mystical themes expressed through private symbol rather than public, consensual allegory or metaphor.’ The ‘Romantic response was characterized by struggle and engagement with the world, while the Symbolist reacted by withdrawal and a carefully cultivated detachment from his time and place.’ Their ‘highly subjective, content-laden and frequently esoteric works’ suffered from neglect as their ‘personal, subjective and not infrequently visionary aesthetic’ ran ‘counter to the prevailing naturalism and materialism of late nineteenth-century culture’. The ‘factual and empirical bias of American hagiographers allowed little room for the canonization of mystics, visionaries, dreamers and escapists of a Symbolist stripe’ so that ‘the references to artists’ relations with the subjective and introspective alien aesthetic remained few, and in general ... been made only with specific focus upon individual alliances or affinities so as not to dispel the main drift of American historiography.’

Art criticism in America, a writer noted in 1880, ‘has been too mixed up with journalism, and journalism’ had come ‘to mean hasty and unformed writing’ so that there is ‘a few cultured and two able and brilliant writers who’ had ‘devoted themselves particularly to this branch of periodical literature, but there is no body of men competent both to criticize and to write, and thoroughly versed not only in the technique of art, but in that of art criticism as well.’ Ryder was established, with Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, as representative of the highest achievement of the nineteenth-century American artist, and The Museum of Modern Art canonised them in that capacity in 1930. Ryder’s ‘dreamy vagueness’, the ‘mystical overtones’ of his art and his literary subjects did not however ‘neatly harmonize with the emerging creed of the American vision as a empirically realistic one.’ The objectivist view, the idea that ‘you see things and not the ideas of things’, an ‘ever-active life’ developing ‘in them the virtue of an immediate reaction with reality’, as the French writer Paul Bourget, in Outre-Mer: Impressions of America, termed it in 1895, was developed early in America. In 1927 Frank Jewett Mather, author, in 1929, with Charles Rufus Morey and William James Henderson, of The American Spirit in Art, ‘lamented the fact that “the American mind is concrete and little disposed to let itself wander, and as little to mystical concentration.”’ Hence ‘the mood of vision’ is rare in American paintings and literature. Royal Cortissoz, in the book American Artists, agreed, noting ‘the prevailing tendency in American art has been toward an objective treatment of the facts of nature.’ This rendered ‘all the more conspicuous—and valuable the works of a man rich in imagination.’ Later, in 1963, Perry Miller, in the work he edited on the American Romantic Margaret Fuller, wrote that America is ‘the land of enterprise and industry, where the “Romantic movement” could never penetrate more deeply into the life of the Republic than into the fragile brains of a pathetically few intellectuals.’ In this narrow climate of opinion the neglect of ‘the visionary, sensual fantasts of the late nineteenth century’ becomes understandable if not excusable. The ‘symbolic and intuitive concerns of ... turn-of-the century introspective artists’ were, ‘with only a few exceptions,’ neglected for a long time due to ‘the hegemony of formalist criticism and historiography in the twentieth century.’ The ‘quest for “symbolic form”’ blinded many critics and historians ‘to the equally significant search for “significant content”’.

Artists suffered from such neglect. Ralph Albert Blakelock, for instance, had his first breakdown in 1891 following a period of great neglect and little recognition. Subsequent series of breakdowns culminated in a severe one of 1899, after which he was committed to Middleton State Hospital for the insane at Middleton, New York. Critical and public hostility to an exhibition of Louis Michael Eilshemius led to his abandonment of painting and he began a long period of mental and physical decline. In his study American Visions, the Epic History of Art in America, Robert Hughes continued this attack on such artists. Thus he was dismissive of Ryder’s art stating that Ryder was ‘an erratic painter’ and ‘an appallingly bad technician’ who was awkward, and whose ‘men and women looked like slugs.’ Ryder, Hughes adds, ‘was like Edgar Allan Poe-so overwrought, and yet so influential.’ Yet he cannot deny, and admits, that ‘a succession of American artists from Marsden Hartley to Jackson Pollock and beyond’, looked up to Ryder ‘as an emblem of esthetic purity, a holy sage, and the native prophet who linked tradition to modernism’, and his art is still praised by such perceptive writers on art as John Updike, who is sympathetic to the ‘Transcendental vision’ in American art, praising the artworks of such major figures as the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who taught ‘the value of seeing’ and ‘the meaning of seeing’, and the American pioneer of abstract art, Arthur Dove, who turned toward ‘pure painting’. Yet an Australian literary critic like Andrew Reimer still sees in Hughes a critic who ‘has held firm to a notion, or suspicion perhaps, that the best and most enduring of art incorporates apprehensions of the spiritual.’ Note here the words notion, suspicion and apprehensions. Nothing could illustrate more what is so often the very low standard of criticism in Australia that Reimer does not account, in his study of Hughes, how often Hughes has denigrated or ignored the importance of the sacred in art. Thus, in his history of art in Australia, Hughes is dismissive of Michael Kmit’s art although, to be fair, he was appreciative of Leonard French’s art. Kmit was an important influence on other Australian artists, like Leonard French and Ignacio Marmol, in the 1950s and 1960s, who wanted to explore man’s soul, or, like Elwyn Lynn, saw the canvas as a place for contemplation. Kmit who, like Malevich, used, in the 1960s, the device of the circle within a square, was ‘revered for his rich, luminous colour and enamel-like surface.’

Like Hughes, many commentators on art have often ignored the spiritual basis underlying many artist’s work but an examination of such art books and art catalogues as Roger Lipsey’s An Art Of Our Own, The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art, Charles A. Riley’s The Saints of Modern Art, The Ascetic Ideal in Contemporary Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music, Dance, Literature, and Philosophy, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, produced by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1986, Spirit + Place, Art in Australia 1861-1996, curated by Nick Waterlow and Ross Mellick at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, from November 1996 to March 1997, and Beyond Belief, Modern Art And The Religious Imagination, curated by Rosemary Crumlin and published by the National Gallery of Victoria in 1998, demonstrates the extent to which underlying spiritual concerns have been a major part of art made over the last century. This concern was also the major focus of the Art and the Sacred and Tasmania exhibition, that was curated by the author of this article, at the School House Gallery, Rosny Historic Centre, Clarence in November 2005, that featured artworks by Peter Adams, Tim Burns, Dawn Csutoros, Chantale Delrue, Peter Gill, Uli Gurung, Gay Hawkes, Todd Jenkins, Leslie Kingsley, Sue Lovegrove, David Martin, Petra Meer, Kathleen MicMhuirich, David Nash, John Robertson, Veronica Steane and Alex Wanders. Artists such as Wassily Kandinsky prophesied the great epoch of the Spiritual as providing the soil ‘in which a kind of monumental work of art must come to fruition’, and railed about the way in which ‘the pure, exaggerated materialism’ of his time blocked spiritual development. Such materialism has not declined but has only intensified, resulting in the growth of a shamanic consciousness on the part of many artists and writers as a response to the assault on Mother Earth, and the increasing resort to warfare, that has accompanied such a plunder of the world’s resources. As part of a search for a higher consciousness, given the necessity of human beings to evolve to meet the challenges of an increasingly depleted universe, as a result of ecological destruction that has eventuated due to the greed, indifference and stupidity of many human beings, spiritual concerns have underpinned much major art of the last century. In Alex Wanders’s case, these spiritual concerns are that of his Christian faith.

Some of Wanders’s classical religious paintings have a serene quality as in Millstone (1993, acrylic on canvas, 45 x 45 cms) and Paris (1993). Some are depictions of arcadia as in The Peaceable Kingdom (1989, oil on board, triptych, 35 x 22 cms). Some explore the contradiction between the attempt to establish a sense of arcadia in Van Diemens Land through the establishment of English type gardens and the reality of the barbarity of the convict system. Others again—St David’s Park (1993, acrylic on canvas, 61 x 91.5 cms) and Entombment (1994, acrylic on canvas, 40.5 x 91.5 cms)—explore the contradiction between the attempt to establish a sense of arcadia in Van Diemens Land through English type gardens and the reality of the island’s barbarous convict system. In these paintings Wanders dealt with the possibility of achieving a state of arcady in society as well as the state of barbarity that is so often present in life. There is, in Tasmanian Story (1994, acrylic on canvas, 45 x 33.5 cms), an unsettling feeling, a foreboding that something is seriously going wrong with this state.

Wanders’s arcadia paintings have an affinity to such paintings of Alex Colville as Three Horses (1946, oil on canvas, 20 x 20 inches) and Group of Horses (1947, oil on canvas, 28 x 38 inches). Colville’s artworks, such as Skater (1964, acrylic panel), are about being, ‘about controlled but relaxed conscious movement in a kind of elemental, void-like aspect of nature — a kind of environment ... many people find frightening. However, the Skater is not frightened’ as he has overcome ‘the fear of participation with environment.’ Colville, as an artist, ‘has the courage to dwell amid the loneliness of lofty peaks’. ‘In the order found in nature itself’ he ‘discerns the hand of God, so that the world cannot be the nothingness which filled Sartre with anguished loneliness, but a meaningful place in which everything has the common purpose to fulfil a proper function according to the natural and distinctive faculties with which each is individually endowed.’ Colville believes that, as St Paul stated in Corinthians VI, 19-20: ‘You are not your own./ For you are bought with a great price. Glorify and bear God in your own body.’ As Pope Pius XII once said, ‘The function of all art lies in providing a window on the infinite for the hungry soul of man.’

The scene in Colville’s Boat and Marker (1964, serigraph, 19 x 19 inches), Helen J. Dow states, is based on ‘a condition of “standing outside, stepping outside the routine which society tells us to take for granted.” The sailor’s head is hidden by the sail because spiritually he is alone, set apart from all other people in his personal confrontation with the Ultimate.’ For Colville, and other like minded artists, life has a purpose even though its meaning is hidden, so that human beings are ‘able to face all of life with serenity.’ ‘Everything’, the Catholic philosopher Teilhard de Chardin wrote:

beyond a certain distance is dark, and yet everything is full of being around us. This is the darkness, heavy with promises and threats, which the Christian will have to illuminate and animate with the divine Presence.

Those, Teilhard de Chardin added, ‘who spread their sails in the right way to the winds of the earth will always find themselves borne by a current towards the highest seas.’

The search for identity, the historian Page Smith wrote, in his book The Historian and History, is doomed to shipwreck if it fails not only to consider the historic dimension of man’s experience, but to preserve “a sense of history as the unfolding of time pregnant with Divine.”’ ‘A loner in a lonesome land’, Colville’s art ‘is more prized for its solitary spirit and solitude of atmosphere than many more friendly and comforting prelapsarian virtues.’ Colville, Lincoln Kirstein states, ‘is a precious master, outside the main currents of progressive annual vogues, just as Robert Frost, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman were, at their first appearance, popular artists firmly against the current popularities.’ ‘The taste-making markets shy away from work which represents little save familiar bankable styles and signatures.’ ‘The renown of these men is ... ambiguous.’ They depend ‘on their popular appeal over the heads of the mafia of museums, dealers and journalists.’

From 1982 to 1985 Wanders taught at Burnie High School on the North West Coast of Tasmania, and at the Leighlands Christian School in Ulverstone from 1986 to 1987. He wondered whether he should continue as a teacher or go more deeply into his art and felt that part of the important thing about teaching was that students really challenge you, and had the Christian belief that if you have an ability in an area, you need to use it. The bottom line was the idea of stewardship. In Penguin, where Wanders went to workshops, the Minister there knew about the Reformation tradition as part of the theology of the Reformed Church.

Cows and such other symbols as trees, the egg, flames, vessels, pools and the rainbow occur in Wanders’s art, and point to deeper realities. For example, Wanders has used the cow, which is represented in Dutch realist paintings as a symbol of plenty, wealth and contentment, a number of times in his art. The cow is also a symbol of domesticity and ‘of the whole feminine realm. When a man stops projecting his Anima on to actual women — symbolised by the flesh of the cow, which is sacrificed to the spiritual Athene — then the spiritual Anima becomes an ally.’ In Celtic mythology the quest is for the anima, the feminine principle and the self, ‘a wiser, older man’. ‘In Hindu mythology the cow ‘is called Go Matha, “Cow who is a Mother” because, like the Ancient Roman Earth Mother, she represents Earth the Nourisher.’ For the activist Mahatma Gandhi, ‘the cow transcends the mother image by embodying the personification of innocence, so that “Man through cow is enjoined to realize his identity with all that lives.”’

In his Unlit Voices exhibition in 1990, that arose from his desire to present aspects of his Christian faith through the medium of painting, Wanders presented the themes of sacrifice, redemption and salvation in small, luminous paintings, with images of paradise, arcadia, death and resurrection. For Wanders, as with many others, faith is still alive and well in the world despite what others may say. Wanders made use of the triptych format in a number of these paintings, such as City of Refuge (oil on board, 30 x 23 cms) and The Bridge (both 1989, oil on board, 30 x 15 cms), not only because of its historical association with Christianity but also because the three panels produce an image suggesting the unity of the trinity. ‘What one might sense in the religious quality [of Wanders’s paintings]’, Ted Colless commented, ‘is the proximity of a whispering God, a God in darkness.’ Cow in Landscape (1989, oil on board, 30 x 15 cms), Colless added, ‘holds an inner vision at the very edge of consciousness, on the brink of a metamorphosis; and it reveals a simple sensation of place in a subtle transformation into a spiritual experience.’

Wanders’s art, throughout the 1990s, increasingly dealt with the need for humans to act and take responsibility for their lives. Such art is extremely appropriate for the times we live in with the extent of corruption and unbridled power present in the world, a situation that has resulted in the emergence worldwide of widespread protest movements at such places as the World Economic Forum in Melbourne in September 2000. ‘The anti-global free-trade movement in its mood of moral seriousness, empowering and animating people to fight injustices’, Guy Rundle writes, is ‘more akin to the Reformation, or the anti-slavery campaigns of the early 1880s, in which large numbers of people were suddenly called out, their consciences spoken to’, than ‘about sixties-style self-liberation.’ ‘It is the contemporary equivalent of Martin Luther’s “Here I stand. I can do no other.” It is the moment when the individual conscience holds firm and history pivots upon it.’

Wanders used such symbols and allegories as the centaur, pan and the temple in his art to address these issues. For example some of his paintings are inhabited by centaurs who are ‘close to the animal realm in a riotous, brutish unrestrained way’. The wild natural man is of crucial significance for society ‘as the valuable animal instincts get more threatened in an increasingly complex society.’ In mythology Chiron is distinguished among the centaurs as being far more conscious and more civilised than the rest of the centaurs. Living in a cave with an animal body he is also an educator. Wounded by accident he comes to know the nature of the wound and thus can not only heal himself but also the rest of society.

In Wanders’s Entombment a male Pan like figure plays the flute. Pan is connected to the Dionysian side of life. He personifies natural behaviour beyond the range of conscious ego purposes and so is the source of relationship with the divine realm of Mount Olympus and thus the authentic spontaneous seed of the self. Carl Jung said if Pan or God is dead, that is, sunk in the unconscious, it is no good pretending God is alive—which only adds stupidity to consciousness. Instead God must be brought to life.

Drawing Zinc Works (1997, etching, triptych; three panels, each panel 56 x 76 cms), part of a suite of works gallery director Dick Bett commissioned, that featured nine artists, and was printed by Ray Arnold in Arnold’s then studio in Mount Nelson, Hobart, are dark and satanic as befitting the nature of this place. Arnold deliberately made these prints quite grungy by wiping back areas of the plate and leaving fingerprints and scruff made by accident on them on the plate.

Wanders’s Tower (Tower of Babel - Genesis) (1999, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cms) symbolises the dangers of human arrogance and hubris while Ark (1999, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cms), that illustrates a story taken from the Books of Exodus & Revelation, refers to the growth of faith and the need to live it through commitment and social action that can logically result in political protest.

Geometrically organised Ark includes concentric circles, diamonds and squares, and deals with the idea of a vessel or container. The diamond starts at the end of the circle in this painting, and then expands out from the circle, from its innermost self, like a sea or an ocean. Here, where its life force is illuminated, it is brightest.

Melchizedek’s Order (2000, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cms) refers to Melchizedek, the first person described in the Old Testament as a prefiguration of Christ, and illustrates in an incubator-like structure the process of the refinement of the soul that Catholic mystics like St. Teresa of Avila (1515-82), and such books of mysticism as The Cloud of Unknowing, have addressed. In The Interior Castle Teresa of Avila wrote of the spirit becoming enkindled and illumined ‘by a cloud of the greatest brightness’ and described the soul as being like a castle whose rooms have to be penetrated to find God at its center.

From 2000 to 2003, and again in 2006, Wanders’s art took a different direction from the metaphysical depth of his Melchizedek’s Order exhibition. As if to earth himself, after the transcendental flight of this exhibition, and to learn new skills as a very good, close observer of the world he lives in, Wanders grounded his art through very detailed, fine drawings and paintings of the city of Hobart, and areas related to Hobart as Pontville. Such artworks included Autumn View (2003, oil on canvas, 69 x 82 cms) Wanders’s depiction of the Derwent River, the hills of Droughty Point, and the suburban streets of Bellerive and Howrah, as seen from the front lawn of his house, and such exceptionally fine, detailed drawings as Sandy Bay Beach facing Rosny Hill (2000, pencil on paper, 48 x 60 cms) and Looking Up the Derwent River from Rosny Hill (2000, pencil on paper, 45 x 60 cms). Quiet, still works, Wanders’s drawings of this time are especially noteworthy for their meticulous observation. In their rendering of particular places, and thus particular periods of time, they memorably record such places.

Sandy Bay Beach facing Rosny Hill is taken from Wanders’s observations looking north east while sitting at an elevated spot in the park on the hill at Alexandria Battery at the end of Sandy Bay Beach. The slow flow of the water, that is at low tide, is illustrated in this drawing that depicts such buildings, places and aspects of this area as some yachts, gums and other trees such as oaks and pines, the foreshore, Prossers Restaurant, a little house, a park bench, the Derwent Bridge, Geilston Bay, Mount Wellington and Rosny Point.

A View from Rosny Hill Looking Up the Derwent River, taken from Rosny Hill looking north up the Derwent River towards the Bowen Bridge, shows the M. V. Cartela coming down the river, as well as such notable features of this location as Montagu Bay Primary School, houses surrounding Montagu Bay, and cars, buses and trucks driving across the Derwent Bridge. Wanders illustrates, in this fine drawing, a quiet, overcast day at the point where everything becomes still before the sea breeze comes in. The Bowen Bridge and the Zinc Works are depicted on the left hand side of this composition, as well as the foothills of Mount Wellington behind Claremont, Selfs Point, where oil tanks are situated, Cornelian Bay cemetery, and the cliffs above Cornelian Bay Beach.

In The Little Beach at Howrah (2003, acrylic on paper, 43 x 58 cms) we observe the rhythm of the water and the patterns that the wind makes on the water, a pattern that often occurs early in the morning on the Derwent River while The Little Beach at Bellerive (2003, acrylic on paper, 43 x 58 cms) again depicts a still, quiet scene based on the beach at the end of Wentworth Street between the northern end of Howrah and the southern end of Bellerive beach, illustrating the rhythm of the water, and the patterns that the wind makes on the water.

The composition for Tower Road (2003, acrylic on paper, 46 x 46 cms) was painted around 5pm from one side of the road of Tower Road in New Town, Hobart, looking across to the tower on a day when it had rained, as can be seen from the wet road depicted in this painting that ilustrates a still scene in Spring where there is light coming from the West as we see the sky and clouds above the tower. Wanders used thin acrylic paint, with a washed warm underpainting of red oxide, that shows through this painting in various parts of it, to effect its character.

An extremely fine, detailed drawing Mount Direction from Claremont (2003, pen and ink on paper, 45 x 72 cms) shows the view from Claremont looking across to Mount Direction. In making this drawing, that illustrates the view from the centre of Chippendale Street before it narrows and turns, Wanders preserved a fine memory of a particular place and time. We can see Cadburys, the way the Derwent River the winds around to a kind of bay, and a railway track near this bay. Wanders stuck fairly close in this composition to the scene he observed that is not far from Moorilla and Prince of Wales Bay and only eliminated one house from the street he recorded in the way Edward Hopper would change a particular place he had observed to suit the needs of his composition.

There are some very fine details in Wanders’s drawing Moonrise From Alexandria Battery, Sandy Bay (2006, page from sketchbook, 27.5 x 41 cms) that he drew from near Alexandria Battery, from the end of Nile Avenue in Sandy Bay looking directly across the Derwent River to Droughty Point. It turned into a night scene of its own accord, as, in a night scene, you can make a composition become luminous, showing the reflection of the moon shining on the water and the moon itself illuminating the hills.

This drawing, where the lookout is situated at the top right of the composition, has a circular effect so that, if the two figures that are visible in it under a tree turned, they would see the whole panorama of the view. Wanders, who is an admirer of the night scenes Albert Pinkham Ryder painted, did it in such a way to make it a more dramatic composition. His wife, Helen, says, of this drawing, that we are on the eve of a new era. For so many years the Western shore of Hobart has been the centre of culture in Hobart but now things are progressing in such a way that the old Hobart is joining up with the new. The swaying waves of grass in this drawing evoke the emotions.

Wanders is a painstaking artist who carefully constructs very detailed works. His art is concerned with such important virtues as belief, faith, truth and commitment, values that are crucial in a society where greed is rampant and where vested interests dominate much of the media. In a world facing ecological crisis, and where poverty and warfare is widespread, we very much need such important values.

Michael Denholm is author of The Winnowing Of The Grain, Art and Craft Magazines in Australia, 1963-1996 (2006). This book is part one of a ninefold series of books, that he has been researching and writing since 1991, that will be published in forthcoming years.

Contact Michael at: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Michael Denholm