WHAT MAKES
Nick Hannaford tick?
Chaotic. Creative. Tall.
A good deadline always helps. My training was very traditional – paint what you see, not what you think you see. I used to tell people I wasn't an artist, just a good copyist, and it left me uninspired. Now I'm challenging myself to explore new ways to create and paint. It's hard, but exciting at the same time.
Both. There's always a tug of war between pleasing yourself creatively and pleasing others commercially. At times I just want to paint to create, to improve my practice and explore new things. Other times, if you're making a living from it, there's a commerciality you need to balance.
That's very topical for me right now. I've asked myself whether I want to be a solitary artist standing in a studio painting all day. I love creating experiences and memories for people. So I'm exploring how sensory experiences might merge into my art practice, whether that's an installation or something more immersive, rather than simply asking people to stand and look at a painting on a wall.
I think I draw sustenance and connection through all of them. I tell my kids all the time that the three most important things in the world are friends, family and your health. You need all of them to be on the path to happiness. I've been very conscious about being as present with my kids as I can. I think that matters.
One hundred per cent extrovert. I like showing off a bit.
I go straight to our place in the environment and our connection to the world around us. Through painting I'm trying to comment on our sense of place, because I think we're making a real mess of it. As we chase growth and bigger economies, we push as much as we can out of this planet, slowly eroding it and losing our sense of place. My 2026 exhibition PAUSE explores exactly that – reconnecting the stories and feelings of place. Rather than just observing a painting on a wall, what do you actually feel when you're connected to somewhere?
Kangaroo Island and Italy. Kangaroo Island for personal reasons – a connection to childhood and to land. Italy for the culture and the food. I sometimes wish I'd been born Italian, and I wish I could speak the language.
Different artists at different times. Turner, certainly. As a kid it was the impressionists, particularly Monet – they're a big part of why I started painting early. I really admire John Olsen's work, which is more abstract, and the street-inspired work of Jeffrey Smart.
The newer, more abstract pieces where the paint goes down looser. I've been using a palette knife, a big wide brush and a lot of thick paint, and not getting caught up in the detail. There's a freedom in it I'm really enjoying.
It came out of my Lines of Sight works, inspired by my grandfather's old fishing book from the forties. When the fish started biting he'd pull out the book and sketch the coastline, drawing a line of sight from one point to another – where the two points crossed was how he tracked where the fish were biting. I found that book and made work around my memories of him, telling fishing stories through his drawings and mine combined. I loved that storytelling process, and those works sparked real commercial interest.
So the visual legacy concept is about sitting down with people and talking through their connections to family and the people who shaped them. It's about representing a life in art and telling stories that can be handed down. It might be a work for the wall, a sculptural piece, audio or poetry, or working with an heirloom that captures a particular person or story.
I know it’s a bit of a cliché, but I’m very proud of my boys. I guess that comes with a bit of ego. But I’m not just proud of who they are as humans, or of their achievements. I’m constantly aware of how much they teach me often without knowing they’re doing it. As a father, you think your job is to help shape your children, but I’m increasingly aware of how much they continue to shape me.
Fuck knows! You've got to live each day – I don't know where I'll be tomorrow.
Good is the enemy of greatness.
It drives my kids nuts when I say it, but it's about striving to be better than just good. To be extraordinary, you've got to push and search a bit harder in your brain holes.