PAST EXHIBITION: This was part of the EAF21 programme.

Dovecot celebrated the artist Jock McFadyen’s 70th birthday year with Lost Boat Party, an exhibition of paintings which describe the romance and grandeur of the Scottish landscape, alongside the urban dystopia for which the artist is known.

Born in Paisley, McFadyen (b.1950) spent a lifetime exploring the sublime landscape tradition. His career connects the generation of abstract painters who taught him at Chelsea College of Art in the 1970s with an alternative strand of British realism. McFadyen paints the exterior world with a cool detachment that carries an emotional punch, and this exhibition perfectly describes his approach – floating through the landscape to find and show the strange enigmatic portion only seen when looking for something else.

The eponymous painting Lost Boat Party is a monumental work, depicting a seaside funfair which appears to have detached itself from the land and is slowly drifting out to sea. The metaphor for the human condition is unavoidable, and many of the paintings in the exhibition describe the sea with all its implications of threat and indifference, as well as painterly possibility.

Exhibition in partnership with The Scottish Gallery.