Jock McFadyen was born in Scotland, moving to London in his teens and training at the Chelsea College of Art.
He has had a significant and successful career ever since, exhibiting extensively in the U.K. and abroad and being elected a Royal Academician in 2012. His work features in over forty public museum collections and the City Art Centre in Edinburgh previously displayed a selection of work by him in ‘Jock McFadyen Goes to the Pictures,’ an exhibition to mark his 70th birthday.
McFadyen’s work has had a series of different focus points: moving from the witty conjectures he made in Art College, to the population of London East End waifs and strays of the 1980s before he started to produce less figurative work in the 1990s as the urban landscape became his predominant subject.
Throughout his career, as well as exhibiting prolifically, McFadyen has been involved in a wide range of interesting commissions and collaborations. This began with his appointment as Artist in Residence at the National Gallery in London in 1981, which was the catalyst of his move to observed working, of which the East End waifs and strays were the result. In the early 1990s he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to record events around the dismantling of the Berlin Wall before working on the set and costumes for ballet performances at the Royal Opera House.
Jock McFadyen commenced his series of Tube paintings in the late 1990s, signalling a move away from figurative work. The resulting scenes are intensely observed, as McFadyen condenses the details and geometrics of the grubby walls of this odd, passing-through place to an almost abstract vision. In Bank, we can identify the location by the flanking iconic tube station signage and also by the capturing of the curving walls of these underground tunnels, that keep such a bustling city connected.
McFayen has claimed that his painterly influences include Sickert, Whistler and Lowry but for the most part he finds his inspiration in 1970s realist film and contemporary novels and music rather than art. As a result he has worked in collaboration with a range of writers including Iain Sinclair, Howard Jacobson and Will Self.
In 2005, he took his collaborative efforts a step further by founding The Grey Gallery, with his wife, the musician Susie Honeyman. It is a nomadic entity which works with artists, writers and musicians on a project basis, with the intention of working across disciplines and outside of existing frameworks established by dealers and curators.
