Paul McPhail was born in Glasgow in 1966 and attended the Glasgow School of Art in the late 1980s, completing his postgraduate studies in 1990. His talent was recognised from an early stage, and he received several awards, including the Lautrec Bursary Award in 1986 and the National Portrait Award in 1989.
It was at Glasgow School of Art that McPhail met his future wife, fellow artist Jenny Saville. McPhail emerged as a figurative painter, working principally with the human figure and portraiture.
Throughout his career, McPhail has painted both male and female subjects, from large-scale nudes to portraits and closely cropped studies of the human face. He frequently worked on a monumental scale, giving his figures a powerful physical presence.
During the mid-1990s, McPhail also produced a series of heads in which his sitters' faces were obscured with materials including whitewash and paint. These works formed another important strand of his figurative practice.
