Joe Fan
The Great Book of ABC
Lost Sketchbook
Fontainebleau Reconstruction
Four Seasons in a Daze
Painting
Painting
Painting
Celebration
Joe Fan was born in Hong Kong and came to Scotland in the 1960s to train as a graphic designer, going on to enrol at Gray's School of Art. On graduation he received a Miller Homes Young Scottish Artist of the Year scholarship and was sent to Paris to spend time at the Cité Internationale des Arts.
He returned to Aberdeen and became a lecturer in drawing and painting at Gray's School of Art. He gave up this role In the late 1990s to pursue a full-time career as an artist. He continues to live and work in Aberdeen and was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 2003.
Joe is not a painter in the traditional manner of the Scottish art schools. His work is based on a narrative idea that he explores in paint, creating a fanciful world that should never be taken at face value. It is easy to become immersed in one of his landscapes, with their affinities with those of Brueghel and Mantegna, and enter the life of each individual painting, full of incident and anecdote.
Joe says: "The theme of the garden, currently appearing in my work, enables me to re-imagine, 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's artwork illustrates our Keynotes article A New Beginning to an Old Story by Michael Barrett in Issue 311 of Resurgence & Ecologist.
