The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Friends reunited
IF you’re lucky, the friends you make at 18 remain friends for a lifetime. This has certainly been the case for two gauche young art students who met on their first day at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) in 1976. From the moment Lex McFadyen, who grew up in the Ayrshire village of Symington, and Madeleine Hand, a townie from Motherwell, introduced themselves, their friendship grew.
The pair went on to share a studio, live in the same Glasgow flat, get to know each other’s family and partners and to support, critique and encourage each other throughout their careers.
Now, as the artists prepare to exhibit together for the first time, at the Glasgow Gallery in the city centre, McFadyen recalls how he and Hand were placed by their tutor, painter Barry Atherton, in the same studio corner of premises that GSA then owned on Blythswood Square.
The two artists followed different paths as they went through art school. McFadyen graduated in sculpture, before pursuing a career as a fashion designer, while Hand specialised in illustration and successfully built a career in that field.
Since giving up his fashion business in 1998, McFadyen has carved out a niche for himself as a painter, dividing his time between a home by the side of the Crinan Canal in Argyll and the medieval village of Noyers sur Serein in Burgundy, France.
Every summer (this year being an exception), McFadyen and his husband, Brendan Docherty, run a gallery called La Galerie Ecossaise in Noyers, where they exhibit work by Scottish artists.
In June 2018, days before a planned exhibition in the village to celebrate his 60th birthday, McFadyen was painting in his attic studio in the village when Docherty heard a loud hammering sound. He rushed upstairs to find his partner using a hand to bang the studio floor.
Help was quickly summoned and soon McFadyen was being airlifted to a specialist neurosurgical unit in Dijon, where he was diagnosed as having suffered a near-fatal subarachnoid haemorrhage.
He was quickly operated on and spent three and a half weeks in intensive care.
Some two years on, McFadyen knows that he is lucky to have made a full recovery.
“My memory is a bit furry around the edges,” he laughs, “But bear with me!” Some strange things happened along the way, like losing his sense of taste and forgetting how to mix oil paints to create his vivid still lifes, landscapes and figurative paintings.
Never one to be defeated, he started all over again with a totally new colour palette – and one which sings with the joy of being alive.
He and Docherty have also been hatching plans – despite Brexit – to move their gallery in France to larger premises in Noyers, allowing more work from Scottish artists to be exhibited. It will also allow McFadyen to experiment with creating ceramic work on a new kiln he has bought.
McFadyen’s oil paintings and small charcoal drawings in this latest exhibition reflect the influence of his two studios.
His training as a sculptor is writ large in contrast to the more delicate forms and muted tones of Hand’s watercolours.
There’s a powerful zing in all McFadyen’s oil paintings, be that in juicy still lifes or landscapes dappled with the high summer light of Argyll and Burgundy.
In contrast, Hand’s paintings, are inspired by her house, garden and the rolling Perthshire countryside surrounding her home in Dunkeld. The two artists couldn’t have more contrasting styles yet the work nestles alongside each other perfectly.
Hand’s paintings are rooted in narrative scenes; be that on a domestic scale or out and about. There’s a poetic