(1914 - 1985)
Born in Glasgow, Tom MacDonald trained as a marine engineer, and was largely a self-taught artist – he attended just one session at the Glasgow School of Art. Living and working in the city, he became a close friend of J. D. Fergusson (1874–1961), one of the most prominent Scottish Colourist painters; and Josef Herman (1911–2000), the Polish émigré artist who settled in Glasgow in 1940. MacDonald’s artistic range was versatile – he produced purely abstract paintings as well as a series of Expressionist pictures that were inspired by Glaswegian working-class life. Other paintings by him often featured cowboys and clowns, two themes which allowed him to explore different ranges of human emotion. For many years, MacDonald also lectured on art at Glasgow University and participated in exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Society of Scottish Artists and the Scottish Arts Council. He showed work at the inaugural exhibition of the Compass Gallery in Glasgow in 1969, after which he continued to hold solo shows there and at the Third Eye, another of that city’s galleries.
