‘Oh dear, here’s someone who can draw. How the hell is he going to get on in the art world?’

Jock McFadyen RA first met Stuart Pearson Wright in the classroom at his weekly seminar at the Slade. He remembers Wright as ‘a greyhound out of the traps’, hungry for success and anxious to be able to make work. The friendship endured past art school and Wright's early success with the BP Portrait Award, with the two working in adjoining studios in Hackney for a time. Join us for a discussion about the nature of art, ‘making it’ as an artist, and the allure of the winning formula.

STUART PEARSON WRIGHT: HALFBOY continues at The Heong Gallery until 6 February 2019.

About Stuart Pearson Wright

Stuart Pearson Wright (b. 1975) trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, during which time he won the BP Portrait Awards Travel Award (1998) awarded by the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). The subsequent exhibition at the NPG opened to rave reviews and Wright was heralded ‘a Hogarth for our times’ by Godfrey Barker of the Evening Standard. In 2000, he won the BP Portrait Award for Gallus Gallus with Still Life and Presidents and was awarded a commission to paint J. K. Rowling for the collection of NPG. In 2006, Wright’s exhibition Most people are other people, a collection of forty portrait drawings of British and Irish actors was exhibited at the NPG and National Theatre, London. Recent exhibitions of Wright’s work were held at Riflemaker, London, in 2010, 2012 and 2013 and his works are in public collections including The British Museum, Government Art Collection, Ashmolean Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum and many others.

About Jock McFadyen RA

As a teenager Jock McFadyen attended Saturday morning classes at Glasgow School of Art. In 1966, at the age of 15, he moved to England and was educated at Chelsea School of Art gaining his BA in 1976 and MA in 1977. He also taught one day a week at the Slade School of Art between 1980 and 2005.

In 1981 McFadyen was appointed Artist in Residence at the National Gallery in London. His paintings from the early eighties were populated by the waifs and stays of pre Canary Wharf London, he always said that the figures in his work were not inventions but sightings of individuals and events of the time. In 1991, Jock was commissioned by the Artistic Records Committee of the Imperial War Museum to record events surrounding the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and in 1992, he designed sets and costumes for Kenneth MacMillan’s The Judas Tree, Royal Opera House in 1992. It was at this point that the figure fell away from McFadyen’s work and the full-blown landscape, often a serious comment on life in the modern urban environment, and on a monumental scale, emerged and continues to preoccupy him to this day.

In 2005 he collaborated with his wife Susie Honeyman to create The Grey Gallery, to work with artists, writers and musicians on a project by project basis with the aim to work across all disciplines. Jock currently lives and works in London and Edinburgh. Jock has had over 40 solo exhibitions and his work is held by 30 public collections as well as private and corporate collections in Britain and abroad.

(https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/jock-mcfadyen-ra)