Jack Knox RSA RSW RGI HFRIAS D.LITT (1936-2015)

Jack Knox was born in Kirkintilloch in 1936 to Alexander and Jean who had a tailor’s shop.
After graduating from Glasgow School of Art in the late 1950s, he spent a year at the Paris atelier of the French painter André L’hote.
On returning home he used what he had learned there, and from his visit to an exhibition of American abstract expressionism in Brussels in 1959, to continue a journey in painting which would “characterise an artistic style particular to Scotland.” (The Guardian 30/4/15). 

From 1965-1981, he lectured in Drawing and Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art going from there to take up the post of Head of Painting Studies at Glasgow School of Art where he remained until 1992.
The list of his students at Dundee and at Glasgow includes many of the brightest names in contemporary Scottish painting, Stephen Conroy and Alison Watt  among them.
Watt said of Knox: “He never failed to encourage me. A great teacher, and an even better man.”

His paintings are held in most of the major Scottish public collections, and he received a number of honours and awards, the Royal Scottish Academy’s Maude Gemmell Hutchison prize and an honorary degree from Glasgow University being the most notable.

His work has illustrated many books including The Scottish Bestiary by George Mackay Brown.