Artist Profile

Jack McGarrity (b. 1995, Scotland). Lives and works in London.

Jack McGarrity is a painter who works in oil, flashe, egg tempera, gouache and collage. He paints everyday scenes and small moments that are easily overlooked. His works have often drawn on film and comic strips, placing ordinary objects and figures in situations that are slightly strange or comic.

He paints in oil alongside flashe, a matt vinyl paint, on linen, jute and canvas, and most recently on stretched tea towels. He usually begins with a bright ground and works towards darker tones, leaving parts of the ground and earlier layers visible. Ideas start as small pen and pencil drawings made outdoors. In the studio he develops these into works on paper in gouache, pencil and oil pastel, and some of them then into paintings. Earlier large canvases, such as Drummer Boy and Summer of Love (both 2022), include torn-up studio drawings as collage. Recent paintings show figures at dusk on shorelines and in meadows, fires on headlands, and interiors at night, such as a sash window or a radiator

McGarrity graduated with First Class Honours in Painting and Printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art in 2019. He completed the postgraduate Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School, London, in 2021. The Richard Ford Award took him to the Museo del Prado, Madrid, for two months in 2018, and the RSA John Kinross Scholarship took him to Florence for three months in 2019. He received the Sir Denis Mahon Award in 2021. His solo exhibitions include Theatre as Studio, Studio as Theatre (2023) and The Gloaming (2026) at Messums, London, which represents him. In 2026 he held a residency at Dumfries House.

His work is held in the Royal Collection and the collection of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture.