• 1/4/2008
  • Australia
  • Mike Sexton
  • www.abc.net.au

For Australian artists, there’s no more coveted prize than the Archibald Award for portraiture. For one painter, the prestigious event is an annual source of both celebration and frustration.

Robert Hannaford has never won the prize, despite being short listed an extraordinary 18 times in a row, as well as winning the people’s choice three times.

But for the man whose portraits hang in parliaments, universities and the Long Room at Lords, just being alive to continue his work is celebration enough.

On a sun-bleached hill near Riverton, an hour’s drive north of Adelaide, one of Australia’s great realists is at work.

“The longer I spend here, the more the reality of the trees, the light, the space, the way it works with the composition of my painting, it brings me into closer contact with the reality of it,” says Hannaford.

For four decades, Hannaford has rejected trends and fashions in art, instead he still lives near the tiny town where he grew up and draws and paints what he sees around him.

But the artist is best known for his portraits and sculptures such as Don Bradman, prime ministers Keating and Hawke and Australian of the Year Tim Flannery.

“His art’s based upon I think what David Hockney would call eye balling the subject,” says art critic and biographer John Neylon.

“And it’s relentless and got this sort of razor sharp scrutiny to it, which I think people find when they actually see a lot of his work, find almost unnerving.”

Some would also call Robert Hannaford’s passion for nature unnerving, especially his studio which resembles a natural history museum stacked with bones and carcasses.

Collecting subject material goes back to a childhood on the family farm where his mother would even find creatures in his bed.

“He might have some little snails or something like that. He just loved anything creepy crawly. Anything,” says Hannaford’s mother Vera.

“I find them absolutely beautiful and wonders of design and beauty,” says the artist.

“The way a bone evolves for its purpose is a wonderful example of how nature works, so to speak.”

The artist’s understanding of nature’s forms helped him become one of the most sought after portrait painters in the country.

And over the years, both the famous and the ordinary have sat for him. Each work takes roughly 40 hours and can be an intense period for both sitter and artist.

“He’s like a hunter and when I talk to him about this whole business, he’s waiting for that moment when people relax, when kind of the true nature, the pose just slips away just a little bit,” says Neylon.

His portrait of Lowitja O’Donoghue was one of two works Robert Hannaford entered in last year’s Archibald prize, a competition he’s been short listed for 16 straight years.

“Deep down in the person that is Lowitja O’Donoghue, is a lot of hurt, a lot of pain and experience I think that he’s managed to convey in that portrait,” says Ms O’Donoghue. “He really got right under my skin, I thought, and he really understood the life that I’ve lived.”

But it was his second piece that drew most attention, a self-portrait of the artist as a patient, struggling to overcome tongue cancer and being fed through a tube in his stomach.

“He’s almost victorious, defiant I think the better word is, coming back from the abyss,” says Neylon.

“He came close to death with a very virulent cancer. So it shows him naked, staring down the viewer, perhaps staring down himself in the mirror.”

It’s most likely the cancer was caused by the lead and cadmium in the oil paints the artist absorbed by holding brushes in his mouth. A habit even his subjects warned him about.

“Paul Keating told me, you shouldn’t do that, you know, you’ll get cancer. And I laughed at him,” Hannaford says.

Although it was his art that almost killed him, it was also part of his recovery.

“He was a sick chick,” says mother Vera. “But after a couple of weeks he used to drive himself out and start painting. In a way it sort of helped his recovery. He could paint. Any other job they probably wouldn’t be able to get back to it for a long time.”

Most of his portraits are commissions, and so much of Robert Hannaford’s work isn’t on public view. But a new retrospective and accompanying biography is opening up his art to a wider audience.

But since his brush with death, a desire has grown to record his work, something he’s never previously bothered with.

Hannaford has bought the old garage at Riverton and is converting into a gallery studio to hold the first permanent display of his work.

And he hopes previous customers will contact him, so he can catalogue 45 years of paintings, all while busy working on the next ones.

“I just feel so glad to be alive and more relaxed about everything,” says Hannaford.

“It’s just wonderful to be able to feel as good as I do and be able to do all the things I’d ever been able to do and for the time being, be free of cancer and hopefully to be able to continue in that way.”