monograph by
peter davies

Cliff Hanley's portraits of randomly selected and generally anonymous subjects have an in-yer-face directness that belies the informed subtlety of his conceptual and technical procedures. Seemingly contradictory elements ranging from pop, photo-realism and expressionism are unlikely cohabitees in his canvases. And disparate modern masters like Sickert or Chuck Close are variously recalled in the dispassionate and candid moments of chance observation or in the amplified portraiture that marks Hanley's particular response to his subjects.

These subjects are first captured on camera, Hanley clicking randomly in the streets of London, Bath and latterly Bristol, the three places in which he had lived since coming south from his native Glasgow and settling in London in 1980. He paints directly from these photographs, indulging his eye for expressionistic animation and handling of materials. The portraits focus almost entirely on the face which covers most of the picture surface. The images are loosely painted, relying for their structural coherence not on a neo-classical linearity but rather on the 'sacrilege' of a photographic tonality, the areas of highlight and shadow defining the image and investing it with a characteristic, if crude graphic strength.

Hanley was trained at Glasgow School of Art between 1966 and 1971. His chief influence, William Bone, cousin of Muirhead, instilled the need for discipline in draughtsmanship. For many years Hanley compromised art by playing in a rock band at night and working as an  illustrator  and  graphic  designer  by  day.    After a  serious illness in 1984, however,  he  
returned to full-time painting. He left London in 1999 and moved to Bristol after a short interlude in Bath.                 

Unlike painters like David Oxtoby in London or Sam Walsh in Liverpool, Hanley does not depict celebrity but strives to cover the ordinary and every-day. In such scenarios the customs, fashions and mores of the day are inevitably if unostentatiously captured. All his subjects seem to glory in the glamour of the flash-bulb, and enjoy their instant moment of fame; in these instances Hanley comes across as a kind of street chronicler, an egalitarian late pop painter of the mass. The second-hand source material for Hanley's pictures - the photograph - lends a slightly garish or artificial quality that in turn leads to an impressionistic involvement with a play of light and tone, whether natural or man-made, across form. A by-product of impressionist painting - pointillism - is also apparent in paintings where the artist has deposited flicks, truncated gestures, dots or other markings employed to construct and embellish the plastic image on the flat picture support.

The neutrality of Hanley's subject matter is one that divorces the split-second moment from the continuity of narrative. In his expressionistic approach to what would otherwise be a form of photo-realist painting, Hanley invests a personal mark and with it an air of ambiguity that does not, however, preclude the rare foray into the more explicit world of political or social satire, a recent series of emotive images relating to the plight of Palestinians being a case in point.

PETER DAVIES
February 2004