A Scottish artist who couldn’t remember how to mix colours after suffering a near-fatal brain haemorrhage is to cap off his amazing recovery by exhibiting his latest work.
Lex McFadyen also had to learn to speak again after falling ill while painting in his attic studio in France just days before his 60th birthday back in June of 2018.
Five years on, the artist, who lives and runs a gallery in the scenic mediaeval village of Noyers-sur-Serein in Burgundy with his partner Brendan, is getting ready to return home to showcase his paintings at a gallery in the Stirlingshire village of Buchlyvie later this month.
Speaking to The Herald ahead of his solo exhibition, McFadyen details his recovery and how the need to experiment in the wake of the brain injury saw him start all over again with a totally new colour palette – which had the effect of breathing new life into his work.
He told The Herald: “This is year five. I spent my 60th birthday in hospital. I had a brain haemorrhage and I was helicoptered to Dijon because Dijon has a university hospital there for brain trauma. So I was very, very lucky. I had my operation the day after I was admitted. I was intensive care for almost a month and I was in hospital all-in-all for about five-and-a-bit weeks. That was literally at my birthday.
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“It’s kind of affected how I work. One of the things I quite often say is that I usually do mixes of paints to arrive at colours that I want to use and there were some mixtures that I kind of knew off by heart in a certain sense, I knew which blue I liked to mix with which yellow to make a nice green. And when I recovered I’d forgotten all my wee combinations of colours so I had to start experimenting again. People now say my work is much more vivid and vibrant than it had been before. It has affected my work.
“I get a scan every year just to check up things and I usually get that in Glasgow. The last time I was there, the neurosurgeon in Scotland who perused all the scans said whoever did the operation did a grand job for me because it’s something people sometimes really don’t recover from. He said I was 95 per cent back to where I was. I got a smashing deal off the team in Dijon, they did a great job for me. So that was good.”
McFadyen, who still has a home on the Crinan Canal in Argyll, showcases his own work alongside the work of other Scottish artists at La Galerie Ecossaise (The Scottish Gallery), in Noyers-sur-Serein, which routinely finds itself listed among the most beautiful villages in France.
He has produced 26 new pieces for his forthcoming solo exhibition, some of which are still life and some landscape paintings. It’s far cry from his two decades spent as a fashion designer to the stars, a role he says he “fell into” after he graduated from The Glasgow School of Art.
He said: “I actually graduated from Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art. I fell into doing fashion work. It was a bit of a circuitous route. The year that I graduated from Glasgow I was invited back to compere the fashion show for them. And I went back and thought if I’m going to compere the fashion show I’ll designs some clothes and put in a wee section there. Then I actually got asked from there to do a couple of other things which I did because I had graduated by that point and I was looking for anything basically. It gave me a wee bit of an income. And that kind of turned out as me spending about 20 years running a design company. I ended up with my shop on Argyle Street designing.
“At first when I started painting I did a lot of portraiture. I was using models to pose for me. It wasn’t absolutely connected to fashion but I had a solo show and it was all portraiture and it was well received but it’s very difficult to sell portraiture to anyone other than the subject matter who poses for you. If they don’t buy it then you tend to be left with it.
“Then 10 years ago when we bought the house in France I thought, ‘Do you I know I’m going to take the plunge and head in a different direction, this is a big change in lifestyle so I may as well have a big change in what I’m getting interested in’. I started doing still life. I do a lot of floral work. It’s much more commercial in a certain sense so I took the chance to be able to do that coming to France. I think the combination of going to France and coming back to Scotland to show appeals to people. It’s given a new dimension to the work that I’m involved with.”
Lex McFadyen’s solo exhibition runs at Greengallery, Buchlyvie, from May 20 to June 25.
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