McFadyen's work has had a series of different focus points: moving from the witty conjectures he made in Art College, to the population of London East End waifs and strays of the 1980s before he started to produce less figurative work in the 1990s as the urban landscape became his predominant subject.

Throughout his career, as well as exhibiting prolifically, McFadyen has been involved in a wide range of interesting commissions and collaborations. This began with his appointment as Artist in Residence at the National Gallery in London in 1981, which was the catalyst of his move to observed working, of which the East End waifs and strays were the result. In the early 1990s he was commissioned by the Im...