Contents
Artist’s Preface
9
Totally Useless 15 Life 21 Paint 39 Value 69 Flesh 89 Places 105 Finding the Cracks 151 Selected Exhibitions and Publications 156 Index 158
Life
‘A painter’, reported the Evening Standard in July 2014, ‘says he was arrested and locked up for six hours after complaining about stationary police vehicles left with their engines running near his home.’ The ‘Royal Academy artist’, as the paper called him, had, along with his wife Susie Honeyman and their neighbours, been objecting for three years to the ‘soul-destroying’ stench of the fumes. Diesel particles, as he pointed out, are carcinogenic. ‘Ms Honeyman, 53, a rock musician’ said that ‘sometimes there are as many as four police vehicles left unattended with their engines running … in effect there is always a police vehicle belting out diesel fumes 24/7 unnecessarily.’2 Their complaints had fallen on deaf ears. One day the artist snapped, slapped the bonnet of a police car, and found himself handcuffed, fingerprinted and arrested for criminal damage. Then the Standard took an interest and the police found that the angry Scotsman they had locked up was a member of the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts. They apologised and, for a while, stopped running the engines on their stationary cars. The episode follows a pattern that can be seen throughout McFadyen’s life: a refusal to accept the arbitrary impositions of authority, a sense of justice, a fearless and forceful way of expressing his frustration, a punitive reaction from said authority, a comeback from McFadyen that they don’t expect, an at least partial victory. A tableau forms – the artist, the musician, the police, the handcuffs and the cars – that has both drama and comedy. You could imagine a painting of it. Vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine, whether cars or motorcycles, play a leading role. He was born in Paisley in 1950 and he grew up near Glasgow, in Renfrew and then Inchinnan. His grandfather was a boat builder who drew cartoons in his spare time; his father was a draughtsman in the Clyde shipyards and taught him to 21
draw. One day, Miss Sloane, an art teacher at the local secondary modern, spotted his talent and suggested that he enrol in Saturday morning art classes that were held at the Glasgow School of Art. Young McFadyen liked the idea: ‘The school I went to was rough, there was bullying, a gang culture. It was very, very tough, kids carrying knives and bicycle chains and stuff, so my father sent me to boxing lessons. I didn’t like them because it hurts if you get hit.’ The art classes meant he wouldn’t have to go to boxing any more. The glories of the art school’s Charles Rennie Mackintosh building passed him by, but he did see that ‘someone had taken a nasty little table with coffee rings and cigarette burns and put it on the wall. I thought it was so powerful. A container for ideas. I thought “that’s clever, that’s amazing”. It was a glimpse into another world.’ When he was fifteen his father got a job with the Michelin tyre factory in Stoke-on-Trent and moved the family south to England, to the Potteries, at a time when the big ceramic industries were still going strong. They needed skilled workers and a network of local art schools had been set up to train them. McFadyen remembers going on a tour of the Royal Doulton factory, observing the paintresses ‘wonderfully painting plates that were slowly spinning on a conveyor belt, putting on one colour at a time, the violet, then the green. It was fabulous to watch. They could paint like angels.’ The art schools offered pre-foundation courses, which you could start when you were sixteen. The alternative was to continue at a conventional school, and McFadyen didn’t find the choice hard to make. ‘If you say to a teenager: “Would you rather go to school in uniform or to art school with long hair, Cuban heels and motorbikes…?” It was 1966.’ He enrolled at Newcastle-under-Lyme Art School. But then, when he was seventeen, an articulated lorry pulled out in front of his speeding motorbike. He swerved but still collided. He remembers his relief that his head was still attached to his body, but his leg was shattered. ‘When I tried to stand up to attack the driver my knee went the wrong way and I fainted. My foot was facing me in the eye and my shoes were on the other side of the road.’ While he was recovering in hospital a group of young teachers at the school decided to change the direction of the course, away from art and towards design. Projects included making an interior in a shoe box. ‘There was typography and graphic design but I wasn’t interested. My favourite thing was life drawing. I made an effigy of the principal and set it on fire. I ended up being thrown out.’ One senior member of staff, a Mr Holt, said he should stay, but the young teachers threatened to go on strike if he did. ‘My father went ballistic. He thought it was rubbish to be doing art at all: “All you do is sit around painting women’s tits!” I said all he did was make tyres. The complication was that, having been expelled, the education authority was entitled 22
to reclaim my maintenance grant, and so we were summoned to a meeting with the principal of the college. I can still hear them shouting at each other.’ The upshot was that McFadyen could go to another college, in Leek, to complete his course. He graduated and started applying for degree courses in art but got nowhere. ‘I got rejected from every art school I applied to. After two years I realised why. There was a confidential report on me. I was blacklisted. I gave up.’ ‘The next thing that happened was my gorgeous girlfriend Carol missed her period. That’s why I’ve got a son who’s in his forties.’ They got married, had their child, Jamie, and moved into a flat in the pleasant village of Audley, Staffordshire. McFadyen worked as a hospital porter, a warehouse man, a labourer and, for a while, a dustman – ‘I had the ignominy of emptying the bins at my old art school’ – but he started painting again. He was ‘influenced by drug-taking and the psychedelic. I thought that’s what artists did. I read Aldous Huxley, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Aleister Crowley, all that shit. I’m guilty.’ He exhibited his work in the foyer of a theatre in Stoke-on-Trent. ‘They were big paintings and I had a little Reliant van, because you could drive it on a motorcycle licence, so I had to make them fit. I made them out of hardboard panels that you could fold in half.’ ‘Carol said “Let’s go to London, my friend Barbara’s gone and lives in a squat. You can go to art school.” I knew I couldn’t.’ But he wrote to his one and only supporter at his old college, something like this: ‘Dear Mr Holt, I’m married now and have a child and I want to pick up the threads of my career.’ The old teacher had seen McFadyen’s paintings in the theatre and had been impressed. (It was a place where, in the 1970s, the Potteries’ cultured classes converged, ‘eating their avocados and prawns and drinking their liebfraumilch’.) McFadyen went to see him, and Mr Holt opened the blue folder containing the report that had blighted McFadyen’s progress, tore it up, and wrote a new one. So the artist got into his Reliant and went down to London to see if he could get into art school.
Fig. 22 Jackson’s Ford 2, 2017 Oil on canvas, 102 x 137 cm 36
and accident. There are things that look intended but come through chance and there are things whose apparent spontaneity is constructed. ‘I’m making accidents happen, then I manipulate the accidents,’ he says. Or: ‘You have to set up collisions of paint so you can configure them into images, like a woman giving birth or a road accident.’ Or: ‘If it doesn’t have controlled chaos, it’s a dead thing.’ He likes to paint ‘wet on wet’ – fluid paint onto a fluid surface – on large canvasses. The technique can give oil paint the qualities of watercolour, transparent and mobile, while also permitting, when he chooses, the thick and viscous properties of oil. It carries the risk that the liquid might puddle or otherwise mess up the work beyond retrieval. The canal in Tate Moss, made by sweeping wet paint across the canvas, ‘could have gone wrong. Then I would have had to chuck the whole painting away.’ Once the paint dries its creative possibilities are finished – ‘it’s dead’. This kind of painting, where skill meets chance for the duration of its making, is a form of performance. McFadyen likes to compare it to music: ‘You’ve got everything from a sweeping brush to a no. 1 sable with just two hairs. It’s like in an orchestra: you’ve got brass, woodwind, strings and the guy with the triangle going “ting!”. It’s all important. The whole point of wet on wet is to keep everything in the same key, so every part knows what every other part is doing.’ Actions are instinctive, as well as considered and learned: ‘You do stuff you don’t even know you know.’ This approach has something in common with action painting and other forms of abstraction. McFadyen readily pays tribute to the abstract artists such as John Hoyland, whom he admired from his student days, and Ian Stephenson, who taught him at the Chelsea School of Art in the 1970s. ‘I stole all this’, he says, of his use of impasto in works like Tate Moss, ‘from Hoyland.’ ‘For me,’ he says of his own work, ‘they’re abstract paintings completely.’ He is keen to dispel pictorial or narrative concepts: ‘The idea that people have of painting is that you see a prospect before you and take it down. That’s nothing like how it’s done. Often you paint on a big table, or on trestles. You’re viewing the thing upside down.’ In a similar vein, the musical analogy relegates the figurative content: ‘In Tate Moss everything that the painting is about has disappeared because it’s all about the orchestral nature of the work.’ But his works still have content – they are still paintings ‘of’ something, which show strong preferences for such things as the flesh of humans or buildings, often in some state of decay or corruption, or barely inhabited natural landscapes which have some unexpected affinity to his urban subjects. The content matters in some way that is not only an occasion for creating abstract compositions of paint. For all that McFadyen owes to the techniques of abstract artists, he ‘wouldn’t be happy’ to have only their concerns. 42
Fig. 24 Roman Road, 2007 Oil on canvas, 102 x 153 cm Private collection
Fig. 30 Falaise, 2005 Oil on canvas, 172 x 334 cm Private collection 50
Fig. 31 (following pages) Cambridge Heath, 2004 Oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm
Fig. 67 Mallaig 2, 2018 Oil on canvas, 100 x 150 cm 108
A limited edition of 50 copies of this book, signed by the artist, contains the following work: Calton Hill 3, 2019 Digital print with hand-painted moon, 43 x 32.9 cm Edition of 50 (with 5 artist’s proofs)