ABOUT THE ARTIST
Fiona Mary Elspeth McIntyre was brought up in an artistic family spending her early childhood in Bohemian Dublin. Her late mother Dilys was a talented textile designer/dressmaker and her father wrote poetry and still plays the bagpipes. Fiona’s great-grandfather was the celebrated painter Malcolm Drummond (Wikipedia), a founding member of the Camden Town Group of 1912, and known for his vivid use of colour, strong composition and love of decorative pattern such as ‘Girl With Palmettes’ Tate: Camden Town Group In Context and his most famous painting ‘In The Park (St James’ Park)’ Southampton City Art Gallery. He was a personal friend of Robert Bevan, Spencer Gore and Charles Ginner. His wife Zina (Alexina Ogilvie) was a book illustrator and collaborated with Philip Gosse on ‘A General History Of The Pirates’ and several other publications. Zina was also a pianist and performed at the Wigmore Hall and Malcolm Drummond would often accompany her on the violin at soirées in their Chelsea home and share a studio.
As a child Fiona McIntyre would spend holidays visiting her grandparents on the West Coast of Scotland. Her grandmother Elspeth (the daughter of Malcolm and Zina Drummond), introduced Fiona to the art of the Camden Town Group.
Fiona’s grandfather John McIntyre worked for the Argyll and Bute Forestry Commission and planted the seed for her love of nature, and through his family she can trace her roots back four generations in India to her Punjabi/Scottish grandmother. The previous generation came to India during the East India Trading Company and Fiona’s Italian ancestor Giuseppe Goffredi da Finis (Finch) farmed Tirhoot Indigo in Bihar Wikipedia, her Indian grandmother married into this dynasty. In 2001 McIntyre visited India for the first time and felt an instant connection to the people, landscape and vibrant colours.
ART CAREER
As a student in Edinburgh Fiona concentrated on developing paintings inspired by the Colourists, Cubism, and African and Oceanic fetish figures. She moved to Sweden where she lived for seven years in Lund, and set up studio in an old Leather Factory with 33 artists. In 1989 she trained under Imaginist (Surrealist) printmaker Bertil Lundberg at Grafikskolan Forum (Wikipedia ). He had been mentored by the great Stanley William Hayter in Paris, and Grafikskolan Forum was his own version of Atelier 17. It was within this environment of exceptional artists that she found herself, and Lundberg hugely encouraged her artistic development. Three years later Fiona moved to Barcelona to do an MA in European Fine Art (Winchester), and ended up assisting the Master Printmaker Masafumi Yamamoto at his print workshop. This involved editioning for his clients in various techniques such as viscosity and stencilling. He had a formidable reputation for working closely with some of Catalonia’s greatest artists such as Miro, Tapies and Baruj Salinas.
RETURN TO THE UK
Eventually Fiona returned to England and spent several years in London painting from a studio at Delfina Studio Space, Bermondsey and the Block Printmakers, Elephant and Castle. After struggling to juggle art and survive, she moved out of London and set up a permanent studio in Gloucestershire where she currently lives. This has been a very rich period for her artistically where her focus shifted from the figure to ideas of landscape, trees and mythology. Fiona makes vibrant gestural colourist paintings described by others as a sort of Neo Romantic Colourist Expressionism that vibrate with colour applied generously in broad brush strokes. She is an elected member of The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (ARE) and a founding member of (The Arborealists), a group of contemporary artists reinterpreting trees.
TURNING POINT
In 2001 she contributed by assisting in the resuscitation of copper and zinc etchings of Australian artist Sidney Nolan. A year later she was invited to conduct a residency at (The Sidney Nolan Trust) where she developed a body of work using mineral pigments mulled into oil paint, foraged materials transformed into inks and large drawings, etchings and photo assemblages. This was a turning point in the development of Fiona’s work combining landscape, anamorphic trees and invented flying creatures.
ACCLAIMED EXHIBITIONS
McIntyre has exhibited in galleries and museums in Sweden, Norway, France, Spain, Gibraltar and the UK. In 2013 she took part in a landmark exhibition called Under The Greenwood: Picturing The British Tree, featuring the work of 80 major artists of two centuries from the early 1800s. This exhibition at St Barbe Museum of Art led to a new art movement called The Arborealists of which McIntyre became one of the founding members. Also Capture the Castle: Turner to Le Brun and The Romantic Thread in British Art both at Southampton City Art Gallery and a Retrospective of Forum printmakers: Da och Nu at Lunds Konsthall, Sweden. In 2016 she had a major solo exhibition A Tree Within at Bishops Palace Wells, accompanied by a monograph of the same name written by Alan Wilkinson and published by Sansom & Co, and the solo exhibition Dreaming The Land, a culmination of a residency conducted at the Sidney Nolan Trust, 2021-22.
More recently Fiona was co-curator (Curator's Talk) and contributing artist at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery for the exhibition Paradise Found: New Visions Of The Blackdown Hills. 36 artist following in the footsteps of the Camden Town Group. Currently Fiona is exhibiting in Making Contact/Ta Kontakt at Grafiska Sällskapet, Stockholm in collaboration with Anne-Lie Larsson Ljung. In September Fiona will begin a residency at Hoskings Houses Trust to develop a new body of work.
