posted on 24 Oct 2016

Jock McFadyen: A Book About A Painter by David Cohen

McFadyen is, as near as damn it, a contemporary of mine in terms of age and I remember first coming across his work in the mid-1980s when he had paintings in an exhibition in Birmingham. I thought at the time that he was going to go on and be a really big and significant name in the art world but, although he is prolific and rightly highly regarded within the art establishment, I don’t think his public profile has quite taken off in the way I expected it to. And that’s a crying shame in my opinion.

Many years later when I was rummaging around an antiques centre in Oxfordshire, I came across a limited edition, signed print by McFadyen and although, in all honesty it was pretty cheap as far as art works go, I dithered over spending the money. Inevitably, when I went back determined to stump up what was required, it had gone. A silly mistake and one which taught me a lesson – the fact that it has stayed with me so vividly over the years is proof enough of my disappointment I think. So, having neglected his work for so long and having missed out on having a piece of it hanging in my house, when I saw this book being sold for a truly measly amount of money, I snapped it up.

Mc Fadyen was born in 1950 in Paisley, Scotland and went to morning classes at the Glasgow School of Art before moving down to London and enrolling at the Chelsea School of Art and completing a Masters degree there.  McFadyen became one of a growing number of artists who lived and worked in the East End and began to reclaim the area as a space for creative activities of all kinds. In 1981 he was appointed artist in residence at the National Gallery and a decade later he was doing commissions for the Imperial War museum as well as designing for Covent Garden operas and ballets.

McFadyen also began to draw inspiration from novelists who shared a similar vision for the London environment he lived in – his relationship with Iain Sinclair became close and he also worked with Will Self and Howard Jacobsen. In 2001, Sinclair wrote Walking Up Walls as a companion piece with one of McFadyen’s solo exhibitions and it was at this point in 2001 that David Cohen’s book was published.

In 2005, along with his second wife, Susie Honeyman, McFadyen established the idea of a version of the ‘pop-up’ art gallery – which they called The Grey Gallery – as a location in which artists from across lots of different disciplines ( fine art, sculpture, writing, music) could be brought together without having the usual constraints of the more formal art establishment. In 2012 he was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts.

Cohen’s book gives us a really excellent overview of McFadyen’s work up to the date of publication in 2001 but, as always with living artists, there are now an important 15 years missing that will need another volume to cover. However, what this book and it’s very good text will do is to give you a more than adequate flavour of why McFadyen is such an important contemporary figure and why his painting deserves to be better known amongst the general public.

 

Terry Potter

October 2016