David Fairbairn Portrait of Victoria Hahn

‘I don’t paint or draw specifically for the Archibald,’ says David Fairbairn. ‘I am a portrait artist and my subjects are people who live in my locality.’

Fairbairn lives in Wedderburn, NSW in a community of artists and craftspeople. Victoria Hahn, who also lives in the Macarthur region, is a community artist and a performer with Circus Solarus, a street-performance troupe.

‘Because I live in a bushland environment, my portraits are as much about the landscape as about the people who live in it,’ says Fairbairn. ‘The reason Victoria’s head takes up the whole space is because it’s like mapping a terrain, moving from left to right and from top to bottom. A face has crevices and valleys so it becomes like a metaphor for walking across someone’s face.’

Fairbairn describes the portrait as a mixed-media work on paper. He used dry-point etching which is printed as well as painted and drawn over. ‘It’s a layered process because it’s part of a landscape which is a layered terrain,’ he says. ‘I’m interested in some of the conventions of portraiture. I work from life – in Victoria’s case she came every Friday over 16 months during which I did a whole series – but the intentions of the work aren’t pitched within the normal conventions of portraiture.’

Fairbairn was born in Zambia and grew up in Zimbabwe. He studied in London at the Central School of Art and Design and at the Royal Academy, before migrating to Australia in 1981. He won the Dobell Drawing Prize in 1999 for a drawing of Victoria Hahn’s partner, environmental engineer Tao Triebels.