Programme 1: Chad McCail - Every picture tells a story

Background Information

Chad McCail was born Manchester in 1961. He studied at University of Kent and Goldsmiths College. His detailed drawings remind us of illustrations in schoolbooks. The fictional environments present a harmonious picture of human interaction that defies our knowledge of the chaotic world we inhabit. The narratives contained within each picture are didactically spelt out by captions, suggesting the artist as an agent for social change.

Chad had no notion of becoming an artist when he was a child growing up in Edinburgh. He wasn’t particularly artistic and took no kind of art qualification at school. He was 23 and had just completed an English degree when he first had the notion of art as a career, and that was only due to its apparent pulling power.

It was not until he started to make a living from his artwork about five years ago, that he felt comfortable calling himself an artist. After graduating, he would do art in his spare time, attempting to break onto the scene whilst supporting himself with a variety of jobs he didn’t enjoy. The major turning points in his life have been going to art college, being accepted to the MA course at Goldsmith’s in London and getting a dealer to distribute his work.

Friends influence him a great deal as well as other artists. He reads a lot, including science fiction and psychoanalysis, but he avoids mass media – he does not own a television and only listens to the radio at six o’clock every night to hear the news.

In contrast to Chad’s relative distance from everyday life, he has developed his artistic style with the specific function of reaching as large an audience as possible. He always wanted his work to be on public display outdoors. For that reason, he started to work in black and white – as these colours can be photocopied most easily – and he worked on paper making work that can go through a photocopier and be blown up or shrunk depending on the desired effect. His work is a natural progression from these logistics. He tends to draw images that stand up to scrutiny when blown up. He believes that art has a public function as it can say so much and therefore should not be confined to galleries which have very limited audiences.

Chad makes art designed to make people think about certain issues, and as his ideas have developed, his work has too. He feels that the messages are now more direct and readable and that he draws with more clarity than he used to. He describes his style as polemical and poster-like. His pieces are, in effect, propaganda.

Chad is motivated to make work by certain issues – if he feels strongly about something, if something irritates him, he responds to it through his work. He likes the idea of destroying an idea through the statements made in his work. He looks for a form to represent his subject and then a way to express his feelings and then goes ahead with the process of making and then displaying to the public.