Robert Hagan is an Australian painter, author, television personality and producer. He is best known for his Impressionist oils and for hosting a travel and painting series on Discovery HD television.

Hagan was born in Murwillumbah, New South Wales, Australia and spent his youth in and about the beautiful Tweed Valley. He graduated from university with an Arts degree in Economics and a Diploma in Education, and then taught high school. He began painting as a hobby, but soon realized he wanted a career as an artist.

Hagan took a year away from teaching to paint, but felt he was unable to master the art to his own satisfaction. He returned to the classroom for a bit, but knew he had to pursue his art, and resigned from teaching to do that.

From age 28 to 31, Hagan taught himself to paint. ‘It was the most frustrating period ever,’ he said. ‘I had no clue what I was doing and stubbornly sought no help whatsoever from anyone other than the deceased greats of the past. My big breakthrough came on Freshwater Beach where I stood in anger after three years without progress and made the simple observation that learning starts with the first step and not the 50th! Nature is expressed in its simplest form at the seaside – sky, water and beach and, I worked out, just three colors are needed to replicate it! Just three.’

Hagan spent the next year wandering and painting. He sold his first piece – a beach scene – at a charity art show for $150 and never looked back. He went on to paint around the world, having studios in England, the USA, Australia and Thailand.

As his career expanded, so did his subject matter. He painted the America’s Cup battle off Freemantle, plunged into thoroughbred horse racing, and fell in love with the American West and its legendary cowboys.

“I’ve had many opportunities to travel around this immense country, and quiet bluntly, I’ve been staggered by the diversity of images. The mind boggles with what’s available here in the United States to paint. I’m starting in a very careful way to capture some of the things I’ve seen, and in particular scenes that are absolutely inspirational like Sedona, Arizona, which I suppose to most American artists is old hat, but for an Australian like me, it’s an extremely rich painting source area. One could imagine all sorts of things happening there.

To go from Sedona to Ohio where my painting of Frog Pond was conjured up, the difference is incredible. Frog Pond was painted beside on the tributaries to the Miami River near New Bremmen. It’s one of those little spots that everyone would whiz past at 70 miles per hour and never give two hoots about, but it’s one that definitely has its own magic.

So far I’ve witnessed the awesome magnificence of some of the things America holds, yet been inspired by the most simple and apparently innocuous spots as well. I’ve been traveling and absorbing and appreciating. America is a very pro art country with a strong underpinning of humility in its people. It’s a very easygoing environment where there’s a lot of giving. There’s one thing I’ve learned and that is to Americanize my accent a little in order to communicate with the locals. Even the simple task of buying a loaf of bread can become a nightmare if you use the Australian vernacular.

Life here is not much different than Australia. For the first six months I felt differences, but they’re really to do with mechanical aspects of life like driving and speech, hours of business and things like that. Now that I’m accustomed to those aspects I feel there’s no difference to how I lived in Australia. The only major adjustments to be made are in terms of how I feel about painting in America, and those are fairly clear cut in the way I arrange my palette. In Australia, a red-mauve bonding runs through my palette and here it’s distinctly blue-mauve, so the starting paint for a painting is at a different position. It’s one of the hardest adjustments the eye has to make from the painter’s point of view. In England, you go to a green-mauve.
You could call these hues mother or primary color variations. They’re due to atmospheric conditions, and it takes at least a year to work one out. It’s that which instills life into a painting. Once that discovery is made in a given area, the paintings begin to sing.
Mauve is the mother color and the basis of all paintings anywhere in the world, but unless you travel around you wouldn’t know that. Artists who lived in America all their lives and haven’t realized this might find their paintings becoming flat because in the great push experimentation and innovation they inadvertently lose the color starting point. I’ve seen artists go to Europe and paint there for two years and totally come apart because they got involved in experimentation and completely forgot their starting point over there.