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One of the totally unexpected highlights about flying in or out of Wynyard is the view above Table Cape – the symmetrical lines of red dirt in carefully ploughed fields, the neighbouring rows of luscious green plantings running toward the dramatic cliff, then Bass Strait below the Cape’s ledges. Under a blue sky it is so utterly beautiful and neat and perfect it is surely a version of the bucolic paradise that sustained the tortured dust-bowl farmers in the Grapes of Wrath.

Tasmanian landscape artist Patrick Grieve’s abstract works highlights the resplendent colours and patterns of the north-west, the prized holdings of land too rich to merely graze. Rather famously the Roberts-Thomson family who have farmed this land for three generations export tulips to Holland from the Cape. But Grieve who regularly gets into his car and drives about the fertile valleys hereabouts laments that not everybody has the time to stop. “If you’re driving and in that zone . . . sometimes people don’t appreciate it. It’s a really interesting part of the world.” 

Burnie resident Joanna Gair custom makes handmade greeting cards and papers. Her papers are made using traditional wooden vats, hand cut fibres from plants and ecological methods dating back to the first century.

For Gair, who was born in Wales but spent much of her time in Scotland, it is not always the obvious that gets her excited. “I think the minutiae of Tasmania are particularly inspiring. Tasmania has huge iconic features, but there are things here, beyond the tourism brochures that can connect you to a place.”

Gair talks about the remarkably strange native plants and the shapes of the trees, the lichens and the mosses. “The shapes that come out of this landscape you don’t get anywhere else. I say that with some confidence in having worked in a fair few places across the world. It’s remarkable the colours that can come from nature here.” The minutiae have it seem no bounds: rather famously Gair concocted Roo Poo paper in her time running Creative Paper. She has since established her own studio and, in 2008, is in the process of commercialising a greeting card range which beyond the stirring individuality of the paper will bear her paintings of devils and quolls and forester kangaroos.

Each of her papers has, like wine or cheese, a different subtlety and is very much about her connection with Tasmania. “It’s all about natural qualities and I think that reflects what Tasmania wants the world to see of it. It’s certainly the perception a lot of outsiders have about Tasmania.”

The papermaker can just as easily regale about muses including Cradle Mountain and Stanley but has not long returned from a visit to Queenstown. “Queenstown is amazingly unusual. The people and characters are just astonishing.”

There was a meeting of the minds with Glover winning artist Raymond Arnold, who not only champions Queenstown but as a lauded printmaker has a love of paper. Like Arnold, Gair found Queenstown inspiring. She stayed in Penghana, a B&B with views over Mt Owen. “Waking up there in the morning watching the mist coming over the landscape was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. There is a raw beauty. There is something about the place that made me look at things more closely when I came back [home].”

The stars of the north-west are of course places rather than artists. From Port Sorrell to Queenstown via Boat Harbour, Gunns Plains Caves, historic Highfield, the Stanley headquarters of the Van Diemen’s Land Company and the Arthur River, most of these are regulars in the highlights reel of visitors.

Yet to see these places as artists do simply requires time and a little shift in focus according to Gair. “They are very powerful things,” says the woman who arrived in Tasmania just four years ago.

Grieve gets lots of feedback, mainly from the ex-pat Tasmanians who buy his work. “They [the paintings] strike a cord with people. When people go away and come across something that tweaks what they have been familiar with it resonates much more strongly.” And for those who fancy the first hand experience: “One of the best things you can do is get off the highway and drive up through Cressy and drive through the country lanes. It’s slower, the roads are narrower but you get a much more interesting look at the world. People have busy lives. But they just need to stop,” says Grieve.