Robert Hagan Biography

Writing by Alan Veitch on Sunday, 25 of February , 2007 at 7:25 am

Australian-born, Robert Hagan’s highly acclaimed standing in international art circles is unquestioned. His paintings can be found in the halls of royal palaces in Europe and England, on corporate boardrooms walls and in private collections all over the world.

To accommodate this global demand for his vibrant and extraordinarily varied art works he needs to commute regularly between the studios he maintains in Suffolk (UK), San Diego (USA) and his magnificent beachside studios at Pattaya in Thailand and Surfers Paradise on the Australian Gold Coast. He is today one of the most successful and widely traveled artists on the planet.

But as a young man, almost flat broke and about to set off on a working/backpacking tour of his own country, a glamorous future career as a jet set professional artist seemed just a wild, impossible dream.  However, at that adventurous youthful time in his life, it was exactly Robert Hagan’s impossible dream. After earning a degree in economics and a diploma in education at Newcastle University, north of Sydney, he started a teaching career at one of Sydney’s most prestigious high schools. But after just one year on the tutorial staff he suddenly resigned, offering the explanation that he intended to become an artist.

“It’s always been my secret lifelong dream”, he blithely informed the less than impressed school principal.

The minor detail that he had never had a single art lesson in his life didn’t bother him in the slightest - he simply decided that he would teach himself to be a painter by trial and error, starting off by making pencil sketches. Choosing what his art subjects would be also presented no personal difficulty, because he had always yearned to set out on a year-long self discovery and self learning tour of his own country.

So, at the age of 22, the young university graduate rolled up a backpacker style sleeping bag, slung it over his broad shoulders and strode out onto the nearest highway with his hitchhiking thumb pointed towards the Australian outback. His determined resolve was to pay his way when he got there by accepting any and every casual job he could find, no matter how dangerous or arduous. However, it turned out to be not just a one year, but a three year odyssey of self discovery and self learning. Once he’d had an addictive taste of the rough and ready outback lifestyle he became most reluctant to even think about returning to the urban commuting monotony he’d left far behind. He just wanted to keep on moving, moving, moving.

Australia is a vast island continent of around three million square miles, almost as big as the main body of the United States, and at the completion of young Hagan’s three year wanderings there wasn’t much of Australia that he hadn’t hitch-hiked across. To keep himself provided with food and shelter along the way he found employment in a vast variety of odd jobs. At various times during those adventure-filled years his countless jobs included work as a jackaroo (Australian for young ranch hand), a sheep shearer, grape picker, an outback railway line repairer, road digger and cattle drover. 

For two forgettable weeks he was a permanently seasick deck hand on a fishing trawler in the mountainous seas of the Great Southern Ocean off the coast of South Australia. Tough jobs all of them, but he was a barrel-chested, hard muscled and hard knuckled young man and no work seemed too tough for him to handle. Occasionally, during this daredevil era of his life, he even took on jobs as a bare knuckle fighter in a traveling outback boxing tent show and rodeo riding in Australia’s remote Northern Territory – both, he readily admits, produced little reward for his efforts.

But the continuous visually exciting spectacles he had witnessed in the rugged outback of Australia had affected him greatly and he would feverishly make sketches  at every spare moment. When he finally quit his outback meanderings he turned up in Sydney, hired a run down shed to use as a studio, and proceeded to paint in oil on canvas his personal favorites from the hundreds of sketches he’d made – the life on the cattle stations, in the shearing sheds, the outback horse races, the bounding Big Red kangaroos, the wild dingo dogs and the terrifying, yet beautiful red soil outback deserts.   
 
Robert Hagan was born and grew up in a small fishing village on the sub-tropical north east coast of Australia near the romantically named Byron Bay. He was the second eldest of four boys and their father was the one and only teacher at the village’s tiny schoolhouse that all four Hagan boys attended. Robert’s dutiful and loving parents had the difficult task of keeping their four energetic young sons under control and, at the same time, encourage them to stay focused on their education. They did a pretty good job of it because all four boys went on to become university graduates.  Interestingly, three of the Hagan boys took little advantage of their hard-earned academic qualifications and became professional artists.

Hagan’s first solo exhibition  in Sydney was hugely successful and later when his obviously knowledgeable paintings of outback scenes started being displayed in major cities in the foyers of Hilton Hotels and some of Australia’s largest banking houses there was no doubt that an exciting new impressionist artist had arrived. He began to receive widespread media publicity and because of his easy going nature, fund of humorous outback anecdotes and obvious communication skills in discussing his art he became a much in-demand guest on Australian TV talk shows.

He would tell his audiences: “Right from the beginning I decided that my painting style would be mine and mine alone – right or wrong”.

“I didn’t want to be taught or influenced by anyone else, because I’ve always felt that, on an artistic level, to be taught or influenced or pressured in any way by someone invariably means a certain loss of creative individuality”.

“I’d already attended one university, but in Australia’s there’s a much bigger one called The University Of Hard Knocks and this was the one that taught me everything I know about painting.”

Although Hagan was rapidly becoming a national celebrity with the well-publicized successes of his now annual solo exhibitions of mostly outback landscapes, his breakthrough internationally came, surprisingly enough, with his  first seascape series -  an America’s Cup yachting contest. He happened to be in Fremantle, off the coast of Western Australia, in 1987 when legendary yachtsman Dennis Connor, as captain of Stars & Stripes, recaptured the coveted America’s Cup trophy for the United States by defeating the Australian Challenger Kookaburra 111 by four heats to nil.

Photographs of Hagan’s thrilling paintings of the two magnificent 12 meter yachts dueling in the contest were published in yachting and art magazines all around the world. He went on to paint the ongoing ocean duels of this most glamorous of all yachting events for the next decade. In 1995 Robert Hagan was awarded the International Artist Medal for his America’s Cup paintings and his international status as an artist was now firmly established.

Category: Splash Of Color TV

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