Robert Hannaford’s drawing at heart of exhibition at Art Gallery of SA

Drawing underpins everything that Robert Hannaford has done in his long career.

Robert Hannaford’s early self-portraits are determined and intense (1966 and 1969).

Robert Hannaford is probably Australia’s pre-eminent portrait painter, and this survey at the Art Gallery of South Australia, in his home state, is a timely recognition of his achievement. But it is much more than a collection of portraits of distinguished contemporaries: it is also the revelation of an artist’s journey of discovery, and an opportunity to ponder aspects of the arts of drawing and painting. Equally appealing is the image of the artist’s own life, conveyed not only in his many self-portraits, but in the pictures of his companions and his children.

These days exhibitions often include rooms where the public can make something themselves, but the Hannaford retrospective has the most sophisticated and successful version I have seen: it is a space with a bronze bust in the centre, paper, pencils and drawing boards. The bust is of Sir Edward Morgan, a judge and author, by John Dowie (1970). It is an interesting head to draw but what makes it really worth the attempt is that it is brightly lit from the left, so the forms are clearly defined by light and shade.

Numerous visitor drawings are pinned up around the space, and they are surprisingly respectable. While I was there two other men were drawing, and both were more than competent. It is certainly worth allowing half an hour or so at the end of your visit for this exercise, but even more interesting would be to make an attempt before seeing the exhibition, to sharpen your eye, and then a second afterwards, to see what lessons you had assimilated from Hannaford’s work.

For drawing, as we see throughout the exhibition, underpins everything that Hannaford has done throughout his long career. He has drawn in every mode, from abbreviated sketches of figures seen in the streets or in bars to fully resolved life studies and portraits, persisting in his sense of the integrity of his art against the headwinds of fashion.

For much of Hannaford’s life, from his childhood onwards, figurative art was depreciated in favour of abstraction; and when abstraction too eventually fell out of fashion, it was as part of a more general collapse of confidence in painting itself. Individual figurative painters, such as Balthus, Hopper, or various neo-realists, were treated as mavericks, grudgingly acknowledged; it is only in the past decade or two that the modernist orthodoxy has been dismantled and the figurative painters of the last century are being rescued from marginalisation.

Hannaford was clearly tenacious and self-motivated from the outset and never really doubted the value of painting the world in a direct encounter with visual experience, not mediated by photographs. He was also fortunate to find in South Australia two powerful mentors in the elderly Hans Heysen and the forthright realist Ivor Hele, both of whom encouraged him in the direction he had chosen.

We can sense the young artist’s determination in the very early and intense self-portraits, including one when he was only 19. This and a few others are drawn on white paper, but then the more ambitious series that follows shortly afterwards is on tinted blue-grey or buff paper, like many old master drawings. The tint of the paper constitutes a mid-tone, which helps to unify the whole, while darks and lights are more economically produced with black and white chalks.

These are powerful and thoroughly worked-out self-portrait studies, and of course they are acts of self-examination. But what they represent above all is a series of studies in the effect of light, for each of the heads, like the bust in the drawing space, is strongly illuminated from one side. Strange as it may seem, however, the resulting contrast, though unmistakeable in the drawings, might not have struck the layman as strongly in real life.

In the habitual way that we see the world, our eyes have learned to discount shadow as a superficial phenomenon: eye and brain working in tandem from earliest infancy learn to focus on continuity of form and to ignore the adventitious discontinuities of light and shade. In fact our perceptual system is largely concerned with eliminating distracting data and smoothing out the appearance of the world in which we need to function efficiently.

The artist, however, has to unlearn this habit of discounting, and to rediscover, as it were, the raw data of perception. For an image will only look convincing if it includes some of the very phenomena that our brain is used to discounting. And that is why learning to draw, even at the simplest level of accurately representing a few bottles or jars on a table, potentially entails a deep process of perceptual rewiring.

What Hannaford is doing in these self-portraits is learning to see effects of light and shade which our utilitarian habits of vision tend to make invisible, and to discover the way they reveal the structure of the facial features. For ultimately, it is only the phenomena of light and shade that make these essentially tactile forms of the head intelligible to us from a distance, without the need to touch them for ourselves.

The pairing of two nudes at the beginning of the exhibition becomes significant in this perspective. One is a youthful work (1968) in a modern-realist style, but the other (1996) is far more ambitious and above all assured in its use of strong natural light to model the forms and textures of the body. This formal or structural approach, though seemingly detached, in fact reveals the character of the sitter. If the earlier painting is a study of the figure that says little about the model, the later one is in effect a nude portrait, imbued with deep feeling and pathos.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to watch Hannaford execute a portrait sketch in a demonstration of his method earlier this year. He began, in this case, directly on the canvas, by separating the broadest divisions of light and shade: the right side of the sitter’s face was in light, the left in shadow. Then he proceeded by further discriminations within the shadow and lit areas.

What was fascinating was that he approached the personal via the impersonal, character through objective facial structures. The further he advanced, the closer he got to defining shapes of the mouth, eyes or nose, but even these were mostly revealed by light and shade. It is the opposite of the way a cartoonist might proceed, looking for idiosyncrasies that can be economically noted in a graphic shorthand, reproduced and exaggerated.

Hannaford actually worked as a cartoonist for The Advertiser long ago and his quick line sketches still demonstrate such a facility for the particularities of features or postures. But the difference between caricature and portraiture is precisely in this more patient and impersonal approach to the sitter, starting from an agnostic position, without preconceptions; this first objective approach would be complemented, in the many sittings for a real portrait commission, by a growing acquaintance with the sitter, as the artist sees features animated in conversation and grasps the habitual movements of the face that have gradually settled into its permanent form at rest.

It was a highly energetic process, too: the canvas was placed next to the sitter and the artist would stand back to study the patterns of light and shade before advancing — springing forward might be closer to the truth — to make a corresponding mark on the canvas. Then back again to compare the sitter and the evolving image. Miraculously, out of this radically impersonal process, a likeness began to appear and gradually came into closer focus. It was the opposite of what so often happens to amateurs — or even to Archibald finalists — who more or less get the shape of each of the features, but who find that the parts fail to add up and actually look like the sitter.

This way of working, which has affinities with artists from Gainsborough to Max Meldrum, naturally tends to produce life-size figures, since the sitter and the canvas are seen side by side. In the case I witnessed, the canvas was a little behind the sitter, which resulted in a slightly enlarged head. In the exhibition, most of the portraits are life-size, but the considerably enlarged one of Tim Flannery, if painted in the same way, must have entailed setting the canvas two or three metres behind the sitter.

The display includes many fine portraits of significant Australians, but none more interesting than the private portraits of his own family members. There are drawings and paintings of his first wife, Kate, and of his present wife, Alison — one of the most engaging walls is a little collection of drawings and watercolours of Alison — as well as other companions and four children altogether. It is touching to discover the artist’s features in those of his son Tom, for example, or Kate’s in the portrait of Georgina. Tsering, herself an artist, recalls her mother, but even more remarkable is the pair of portraits of her, one as a girl of 10 and then at about 19 or 20. She sits in the same chair in her father’s studio, but while the child sits with hands folded in her lap, the young woman asserts herself confidently with arms resting on those of the seat.

The exhibition concludes with a remarkable collection of self-portraits, including a couple done during his treatment for cancer a decade ago. In one he stands naked, seen from below, with a feeding tube attached to his belly in the aftermath of radiation therapy. Defiantly, however, he holds the paint brush with which he has just executed this image of himself.

In an earlier half-length self-portrait (1995) he confronts himself stripped to the waist, as though taking stock at the beginning of his sixth decade of life. Here as elsewhere we can see that he is right-handed, although the mirror reverses the orientation of the figure. And here we may be reminded of the way many earlier painters took advantage of this phenomenon.

It is hard for most artists to paint their right hand, because they are working with it: but artists have often posed with a brush in their left hand, because in the mirror image reproduced in the portrait, it will appear that they are standing with the brush in their right, poised in mid-action as though they had just lifted it from the canvas we are looking at. It is an appealing conceit, but somehow it is not surprising that Hannaford never seems to have employed it: though a lifelong student of the great tradition of painting, he is clearly constitutionally averse to artifice, even the artifice of tradition.

Robert Hannaford

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, to October 9