Alan McGowan

I am a practising artist and teacher working with the figure through drawing, painting and sculpture. Working always from life my artworks explore the tension between the inherent elusiveness of the world and our attempts to hold on to it. Seeing language itself as a vehicle for these attempts the language of paint, and of sculpture – colour, tone, runniness, translucency, opacity, line etc. become a second subject in tandem with the model, a parallel terrain.

My artworks have featured at many exhibitions of contemporary figure art including the BP Portrait exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, The Scottish Portrait Awards (2017), the Threadneedle Prize for Figurative Art and the Powderhall Foundry award for sculpture. I have exhibited widely throughout the UK and internationally in group shows in South Korea, Portugal, Finland, Italy, the Czech Republic and the USA, and recently featured in the exhibition “A Bit of Brit” at the Westbeth Gallery in New York.

I also teach figure drawing, painting and anatomy for artists and have taught at the Royal Academy in London, Edinburgh College of Art, and other places. In 2012 I published a book of drawings “The Language of the Body” exploring the relationship between working in the life studio and the philosophical concerns of writers such as Michael de Montaigne and Proust which was named the best art book of 2012 by about.com website. In 2017 I published my second book "Unstill Life".