Arthur Maderson was born in 1942, in London, England. He studied Fine Art from 1959 to 1963 at Camberwell School of Art, London, where in 1963 he won the Anna Berry Award, in open competition with final year graduates from all leading Art schools in England.

His parallel interest in both psychology and psychiatry led him into the field of art therapy. He was an Art Therapist for nine years at Park Prewett Psychiatric Hospital, Basingstoke, Hampshire. Although he continued to paint on a regular basis, it was only in 1982, at the age of 40, that he felt sufficiently confident to exhibit. From this period, he has enjoyed considerable success with all major shows being sold out. His success in the UK has been replicated in the Republic where his reputation as a painter of distinction and passion is firmly established. Reclusive by nature, Arthur does not move in ‘artistic circles’ give interviews or take any interest in discussing, let alone promoting his work. He works at a frantic pace with dedication, determination and unflagging vigour and energy. His life as a painter is shared between Cappoquin, a village in the Blackwater Valley in County Waterford, and a small hamlet high in a largely unpopulated mountainous region of the Cevenne, in the South of France.

Arthur has exhibited at the Royal Academy, The Royal West of England Academy (where in 1987 he won the Cornellisen Award) and the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin (winning the Abbey Studio Award for the most distinguished painting in 1993). He has represented Ireland in a number of prestigious shows.

Arthur has written numerous articles for magazines and has been a major contributor to a series of books on painting including The Encyclopaedia of Oil Painting Techniques by Jeremy Galton, Light by Lucy Willis and Modern Oil Impressionists by Ron Ranson ( where he was included in a list of 17 of the world’s most successful and popular figurative painters). He has also appeared in International Artist Magazine.

A strong advocate of figurative painting, which is currently enjoying a re-emergence, he feels convinced that such painting can be robust, exciting and passionate. Above all, he never under estimates the visual intelligence of the spectator, who plays a shared perceptual role in reconstructing an image. What distinguishes Arthur’s work from others is his commitment to the richness and complexity of the visual world. Arthur is quite exclusive in arguing that we see primarily fragments of what he calls ‘raw information’, which embody often contradictory and ambiguous possibilities. The viewer completes the task of interpretation and as such, is deeply involved in the art of looking. In short he conceives of the world as existing primarily as values which may or may not become understood objects. His task is therefore, to organise into painterly statement values; what we do with these values is to a large extent not his concern, but ours. His single minded ambition has always been to reconstruct the world in terms of rich, fully integrated raw information. The overwhelming tendency is for painters to see what they believe to be there, rather than believing in what they actually see. In this he is quite unique and helps explain the distinctive quality of his work, which is quite unlike others, he throws the process of understanding the world as existing of separate objects into reverse.

Perhaps Arthur should have the last word - in an article he wrote for the International Artist magazine in 1999 he said – “For me painting is essentially a mysterious process, hovering strangely between a thought and a thing. A journey into the unknown which happens when 3 elements combine, first sensor information, second the painter’s response to the initial information, and lastly the organisational demands of the picture itself, as a separate independent entity. The final arrangement of the pigment is simply telling evidence of the intensity and delicacy of this process.

Artist's Work