Behind the Mirror
By Michael McVeigh

Michael McVeigh was born in Dundee and studied drawing and painting in the city’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art. He often depicts fantastic creatures, and claims the inspiration came from growing up near a farm and working at a zoo. McVeigh compares the process of painting to writing a novel, complete with characters, setting and lucid description, and his work often has a narrative quality to it.

The following review by Duncan MacMillan appeared in The Scotsman 12 September 2016

Art review: Michael McVeigh at the Scottish Gallery

Michael McVeigh is a street artist, or at least that is part of what he is. Certainly if you occasionally walk around the streets of Edinburgh, you may well know him by sight. He often takes up a station to draw, perhaps somewhere near the RSA looking across Princes Street Gardens towards the Old Town, for instance, and from time to time he also sells prints of his work from a stand in Rose Street. Now he has come indoors for a major show at the Scottish Gallery. Like Walter Geikie before him, however, also a bit of an outsider and a recorder of the city’s street life as part of it, McVeigh has always managed to be both an outsider and an insider. He has shown quite widely and has also had several one man shows before this one, though perhaps not on this scale. He is represented in several major collections, too, including the Scottish Parliament. For an artist so much of the people that is particularly appropriate. McVeigh was born in one of the least privileged parts of Dundee. School was evidently not of much use to him. He reckons he was “brought up in a zoo”; he got more of an education volunteering to look after the animals, including an unhappy bear, at Camperdown Park in Dundee. He then took himself quite unofficially and with no qualifications at all to classes at Dundee College of Art where he was discovered – tutor James Morrison and Head of Department Alberto Morrocco together reckoned that his drawings were qualification enough and he had to stay. Tutor John Johnstone took a particular interest in him and with his encouragement he completed the course. A little later a trip to the National Gallery in Edinburgh proved life-changing and since then he has made the city his home.

Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/art/art-review-michael-mcveigh-at-the-scottish-gallery-1-4227729