In this volume, the award-winning architecture critic Rowan Moore, author of Why We Build, creates a fascinating portrait of the British painter Jock McFadyen (born 1950), weaving together stories from his life--from burning an effigy of his principal and being thrown out of college to a residency at the National Gallery and election to the Royal Academy in 2012--with an in-depth analysis of his art. McFadyen's story begins in 1950s Scotland, moving via squats in Chelsea during the punk era, to the East End of London, now the subject of many of his large-scale landscapes.

Moore explores McFadyen's decision to "believe in painting" in the face of artists who appeared to seek financial reward before all else. This publication celebrates an important contemporary painter and is generously illustrated with a selection of McFadyen's works, including Tate Moss, a painting derived from an illicit kayak trip with the writer Iain Sinclair along the canal into London's future Olympic Park in 2007.