Art and Heritage Online Database

Collection: Gray's School of Art Collection
Object Type: Painting
Artist/Maker: Fan, Joe
Date: 1987
Media/Materials: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 208 x 239 cm
Classification: Painting

Description:

Figure composition depicting an artist at his easel and another figure playing chess in the foreground.

Joe Fan RSA, born in Hong Kong in 1962, came to Scotland to study Graphic Design at Aberdeen College of Commerce. He progressed to study Fine Art at Gray’s School of Art, where he gained a 1st class Honours Degree. Following graduation in 1988, Joe won the Miller Holmes Young Scottish Artist of the Year and was sent to Paris to spend time at the Cite Internationale des Arts from 1989-1990.
In 1990, the artist returned to Aberdeen and took up a post as lecturer in Drawing and Painting at Gray’s School of Art. He also held the post of visiting lecturer at Cyprus College of Art, Paphos in 1994.
In 1997, the artist gave up his role as lecturer so that he may pursue a full-time career as an artist. He continues to live and work in Aberdeen, dedicating his time to his craft.
In 2003, Joe Fan was elected to be a Royal Scottish Academician.

“The theme of the garden currently appearing in my work enables me to reimagine, deconstruct, and reconstruct different aspects of landscape painting, such as space, shapes and scale. I am playing the role of the gardener in the world that I created.” – Joe Fan

“Joe’s art reflects greater themes of the personal odyssey framed within the smaller compassionate scale. His pragmatic references relate to gardens, but nit gardening, where Homeric and Hellenic tradition is played out within themes of the mundane – the fence, the cloud and the organic form with the all-pervading sense of the broken journey. The everyday event takes on the epic; the journey across the playground, the reflective walk and everywhere that sense that nature is encroaching and encompassing a sense of growth and belonging.” – Rory Lynch, November 2012.
Object Number: ABDRG10107