Many people are surprised to learn that Robert Hannaford never went to art school. Arguably the leading tonal realist painter in Australia, and a much sought-after portraitist, Hannaford has all the skills that nowadays seem so rare and miraculous.

"When I first decided I wanted to be a painter back in the early sixties," he recalls, "I did look at the art schools, but they were doing nothing that interested me. Already, at the age of seventeen, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to paint the life around me. I wanted to study nature - I wanted to re-present it, in black and white or in paint. And I soon realized that by staying home at night, I could learn more than the art schools could teach me in years. I'd spend hours studying all aspects of representational art - looking at books on anatomy; light, the physics of light, form, perspective. I continue that process to this day."

Hannaford is a prolific artist, but he has a laconic approach to his craft. "I've never suffered from artist's block," he says, "because I don't consider it necessary to paint every day. If I don't paint for a month, it doesn't worry me because I'll be thinking or reading or walking or having a love affair - that sort of thing. It wouldn't worry me if I never painted again, because that would mean I was doing something more interesting."

Yet for most of the past forty years, there is nothing that Hannaford has found more interesting than drawing, painting and sculpting. His studio is full of works in progress - portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and a self-portrait that has been on the go for several years. No matter how fiercely the sun beats down on his home in the small town of Riverton, in South Australia, his studio is dark, dusty and comfortable. In winter time he lights a fire, and sits contemplating his next picture.

Hannaford's easel stands beneath a skylight that enables him to manipulate the degree of light that falls onto a painting. He says he is interested in "the full range of daylight - the warmth of the light compared with the coolness of the shadows, the way the sky reflects into the shadows when you're out-of-doors."

He will work on a painting while the light is good, then put it aside, perhaps returning to it in the afternoon when conditions are similar. Like many of the old masters, he recognizes that light is really his subject.

"It's true," he says, "that I can find anything interesting. I could look at the corner of the room and find a painting that could keep me going for ages. It's not that I have to get out and travel in order to find subject matter. It tends to be wherever you look. Any thing, any subject, is the right subject for painting. Everything is bathed in light, and any unusual shape can make for pictorial interest."

Hannaford estimates that he has painted more than three hundred portraits. Unlike so many of his peers who approach such tasks with trepidation, he says that he relishes the challenge of a commission. When the client has his or her own ideas about what the picture should look like, Hannaford will take that on board. Such requests are not unbearable impositions. "They often lead me into new ways of seeing and composing," he says. They break me of my old habits, and that's something I appreciate. I'm the sort of person who likes to break a pattern as soon as I notice one emerging."

"I also enjoy the discipline that a commission imposes, because I have a tendency to over-work things, and never finish. I generally try and squeeze a portrait into six days. When you get into it, it doesn't matter who or what the subject is. It's the same kind of feeling in painting anything. It boils down to light and colour and tone and shape - pictorial composition. Every painting comes down to that."

John McDonald

View the full list of artists photographed by R. Ian Lloyd