Jock McFadyen

Jock McFadyen RA (born 18 September 1950) is a contemporary British painter.

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.

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