Jock McFadyen

Jock McFadyen (born 1950) is a contemporary British painter.

Biography

McFadyen was born 18 September 1950 in Paisley, Scotland. As a teenager he attended Saturday morning classes at Glasgow School of Art. McFadyen moved to England in 1966 at the age of fifteen and was educated at Chelsea School of Art, gaining his BA in 1976 and MA in 1977. He taught one day a week at the Slade School of Art between 1980 and 2005. He married Carol Hambleton in 1972 (son Jamie b.1972) and his second wife Susie Honeyman (violin player in the Mekons) in 1991 (daughter Annie b.1993, son George b.1995).

McFadyen is an artist who is sometimes associated with figurative painting of the 1980s. This has often irked McFadyen who, by the advent of that decade, had jettisoned the schematic narrative painting with which he made his name in the late 1970s.

In 1981 Jock McFadyen was appointed Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London. During this period the painter resolved to make the observed world his subject rather than the witty conjectures with which he had graduated from Chelsea School of Art in 1977. The first pictures to emerge in the early eighties were populated by the waifs and strays of pre Canary Wharf London. McFadyen, like many others, was part of that diaspora of artists which had taken to the East End since the late sixties and he has always claimed that the figures in his work of that period were not inventions but sightings of individuals and events of the time.

In 1991 McFadyen was commissioned by the Artistic Records Committee of The Imperial War Museum to record events surrounding the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. In 1992 he was commissioned to design the set and costumes for Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s last ballet The Judas Tree at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. It was at this point that the figure fell away from McFadyen's work. Full-blown urban landscape, sometimes on a monumental scale, emerged and continues to preoccupy the artist to this day.

Jock McFadyen claims Sickert as well as Whistler and L. S. Lowry among painterly influences from the past, while German and American realist film from the 1970s as well as the contemporary novel and music are influences which are more significant to the artist than those from contemporary painting. During the 1990s McFadyen found a fellow traveller in the writer Iain Sinclair whose Downriver and Lights out for the territory mirrored the artist’s preoccupation with the eastern plains of the city and its estuary. McFadyen had previously worked with the novelists Howard Jacobson and Will Self on prints and booklets. In 2001 Iain Sinclair wrote Walking up walls to accompany Jock McFadyen’s solo exhibition at Agnews and Lund Humphries published a monograph on the artist, A book about a painter, written by David Cohen. In 2004 McFadyen collaborated with Sinclair and others to create an exhibition about the A13 at the Wapping Project curated by the Architecture Foundation.

In 2005 McFadyen and his wife Susie Honeyman collaborated to create The Grey Gallery, a nomadic entity set up to work with artists, writers and musicians on a project by project basis with the aim of working across disciplines and to work outside of the existing dealer/ curator conventions. Projects have included the sculptor Richard Wilson, painter Bob and Roberta Smith, and musicians Little Sparta and Giles Perring.

McFadyen currently lives and works in London, Edinburgh and France. He has had over 40 solo exhibitions and his work is held by 30 public collections as well as private and corporate collections in Britain and abroad. In 2012 he was elected a Royal Academician^[1] of the Royal Academy of Arts.

Exhibitions

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2009 The Grey Gallery, London
2007 The Grey Gallery, London
Wolverhampton Art Gallery
The Grey Gallery, Edinburgh Festival
2005 Roadworks, Rude Wercs, London
Roadworks, Scottish Gallery Projects, Edinburgh Festival
2001 Agnew's, London,
1999 Pier Arts Centre, St Magnus Festival, Orkney
1998 Tegnerforbundet Galleri, Oslo
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh Festival
Urbasuburba with Humphrey Ocean
Kapil Jariwala Gallery, London
1997 Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast
Whitworth Gallery, Manchester
1996 Galleri 27, Oslo
1995 The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
Edinburgh Printmakers' Workshop
1994 Galleri 27, Oslo
1992 Manchester City Art Gallery
Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow
1991 The Imperial War Museum, London
William Jackson Gallery, London
Austin Desmond Fine Art, London
1989 The Scottish Gallery, London
1988 Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston
Camden Arts Centre, London
1986 Touring exhibition, Ceolfrith Gallery, Sunderland; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; Stoke-on-Trent Museum and Art Gallery; Bolton Museum and Art Gallery; Arts Council Gallery, Belfast Blond Fine Art, London
1983 Blond Fine Art, London
1982 Blond Fine Art, London
The National Gallery, London
Compass Gallery, Glasgow
1981 St Paul's Gallery, Leeds
Blond Fine Art, London
1980 Bede Gallery, Jarrow
1979 Acme Gallery
1978 New 57 Gallery, Edinburgh
Acme Gallery, London

Group exhibitions

Many mixed exhibitions in Europe and the USA since 1978 including The John Moores, Liverpool; Hayward Annual; The British Art Show; The New British Painting, USA; British Council Touring Shows; British Figuration, Florence; A13, Wapping Project, London

Corporate Collections

Many private and corporate collections, including Clifford Chance, Deutsche Bank, Fleming Collection, Bank of Scotland and Prudential

Public collections

Amnesty International
Arts Council of Great Britain
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
BBC Bede Gallery, Jarrow
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
British Council
British Museum
City of Edinburgh
Cleveland Gallery, Middlesbrough
Contemporary Art Society
Glasgow Art Gallery
Government Art Collection
The Guildhall, London
Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow
The Imperial War Museum
Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Leicester Education Authority
Lillie Art Gallery, Glasgow
Manchester City Art Gallery
The Museum of London
The National Gallery, London
St Anne's College, Oxford
Scottish Arts Council
Sheffield City Art Gallery
Tate Gallery, London
The Theatre Museum, London
University of Dundee
The Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Walsall Museum and Art Gallery
Whitworth Gallery, Manchester
Wolverhampton City Art Gallery
Worcester Art Gallery

Selected bibliography

2001 Beyond Turners Road publication to accompany solo exhibition at Agnew’s, London, with story Walking up Walls commissioned from Iain Sinclair Jock McFadyen, A Book About a Painter, monograph by David Cohen with contributions from other authors, published by Lund Humphries
1999 From Orkney and Other Places, publication to accompany solo exhibition for St Magnus Festival at Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, prose commissioned from Will Self
1998 Looking Out To Sea, catalogue for solo Edinburgh Festival exhibition at Talbot Rice Gallery Edinburgh, with an essay by Duncan Macmillan
1997 Urbasuburba, catalogue for joint exhibition with Humphrey Ocean, Whitworth Gallery and tour, with foreword by Alistair Smith and story commissioned from Will Self
1991 Fragments from Berlin, catalogue for solo exhibition at Imperial War Museum London, Kelvingrove Glasgow and Manchester City Art Gallery, with foreword by Angela Weight and essay by Tom Lubbock Canal, catalogue for solo exhibition at William Jackson Gallery, London, with an introduction by Jeffery Camp and an essay by Howard Jacobson
1990 John Bellany, Peter Howson and Jock McFadyen, catalogue for three man show at Pamela Auchincloss Gallery, New York, with an essay by Mary Rose Beaumont
1989 Jock McFadyen, catalogue for solo exhibition at Forum, Hamburg, with an essay by Mary Rose Beaumont
1986 Jock McFadyen Paintings, catalogue for solo touring exhibition organised by the Northern Centre for contemporary Art, with an essay by Lewis Biggs, ‘Realism in Art, or a slap in the face with a wet Kipper’
1978 Jock McFadyen, paintings drawings titles, catalogue for solo exhibition at New 57 Gallery, Edinburgh, with introductions by artists Jim Latter and Simon Read

Quotes

Howard Jacobson: I think when pondering the extraordinary resilience of life as Jock McFadyen paints and sculpts it to recall that there is such a thing as a Northern imagination, an Arctic as opposed to a Mediterranean cast of mind and that it finds more to admire in harshness than in ease, more that is native to it in obduracy than luxury.

Iain Sinclair : That’s why these paintings are shaped like cheques. Like the windscreens of American cars. Like the space between quotation marks. They’re not much, when you set them against the transient weirdness of this road, this territory. But they’re all we’ve got. And we’re lucky to have them.

David Cohen : His explorations add up to a powerful and credible argument about painting. If he were a scholar, we would say that he has tested his thesis against different methodologies to arrive at a sustainable conclusion. But it is important for our appreciation of McFadyen to remember that he is not a scholar: in an era which has seen too much epistemological posturing in the art-world, his art is always poetic.

Tom Lubbock : He works like a sightseer without a guide book^[2]

Professor Duncan Macmillan : He paints the buildings he finds, not, it seems just out of architectural curiosity, but in a way that shows us how they are indicators of the values by which we live and the blind forces we seek to control, but that insistently make themselves felt. Ruskin might not have liked the buildings, or the gritty realism, but he would have to approve the thought, and perhaps too the care and manifest workmanship with which McFadyen goes about painting his chosen subjects, though the results are not always very flattering to us and the world we have created for ourselves; for the places he paints are the visible fault lines in that creation, the cracks in the mirror of our complacency.

Hugo Williams: Jock is so easy going about the fate of his paintings that he is prepared to let one of them set out on a highly unpredictable journey, the first lap of which will be on the back of my motorbike.

Humphrey Ocean : Jock McFadyen surprisingly is a Scotsman but he has lived most of his life in London and a good proportion of that in eastern postcodes. His viewpoint is different (I maintain) from a Londoners. There is no ‘work is the curse of the drinking classes’ morality here, no mawkish sentimentality. When McFadyen includes graffiti, it is not an accessory, the whole painting is as urgent and deft as if he himself were in imminent danger of arrest for criminal damage.

External links

• Jock McFadyen
• The Grey Gallery
• Jock McFadyen on Artcyclopedia
• British Council
• Lund Humphries
• Royal Opera House
• Tate Gallery
• Imperial War Museum
• Will Self
• BBC Your Paintings: works by Jock McFadyen in public British collections

References