From art to fashion, and back again: Jonathan Schofield’s figurative work is back in style

‘If we’re speaking about an artistic life, then I really feel like I cheated death,' says Jonathan Schofield, art-world survivor. After graduating from London’s Royal College of Art (RCA) in the late 1990s under the tutelage of the likes of Peter Doig and Helen Chadwick, the London-based painter found that the type of work he wanted to create was out of step with the trends of the art world.

‘At that time, around the turn of the century, everyone seemed to be talking about everything but painting. I had always loved paint and colour, so I felt like I was really swimming against the tide,’ he confesses. Eventually, it was in the world of his other lifelong obsession, fashion, that an opportunity for a career arose. ‘A friend asked me to be art director on a fashion shoot; I took it not really knowing at all what it would involve. When I realised it was essentially about making images – and being paid for it – I just thought that was amazing.’

Now, Schofield is preparing for a new exhibition, titled ‘The Defiance of Summer’ (30 September – 21 November 2025 at Vivienne Robert Projects), having returned to painting. He picked up his brushes again seriously during Covid, following a career as creative director at Stella McCartney. ‘I wasn’t meant to have a second turn of the wheel, and so I feel very liberated. As a young artist, you’re so hyper-conscious of your place in the world of private views and artistic trends that you can feel trapped. But since I came back to it, I feel liberated just to paint the things I want to paint.’

Of course, Schofield’s art-school education influenced the work he did as a fashion brand’s creative director. Is the inverse also true? ‘In the art world, I think there’s a snobbery about the purity of the profession. Work is considered a dirty word,’ he says. ‘Now that I’ve worked in a commercial environment with deadlines, I appreciate the importance of discipline and consistency. When you dig into the lives of the great artists, Van Gogh or Francis Bacon, they were incredibly disciplined. Of course, painting can be something profound and even mystical, but there’s a certain level of mundanity that you have to put up with to get there.’

If his work in fashion helped develop his work ethic and process, it also clearly informs the subjects of so many of his paintings, which often depict stylish bourgeoisie in various states of leisure. I ask him if, when he started painting these subjects, he was concerned about whether drawing from the modish world of fashion might be perceived as being at odds with the supposedly high ideals of fine art and painting. ‘I think if one thing keeps me up at night it’s that people take my work as just an endorsement of the culture of “lifestyle” that they reference. I paint about illusions, the barrage of images we are so inundated with that tell us where we should be and how we should look. These aspirational images are so tyrannical and are presented to us without any irony or context. So I’m trying to inhabit that world and paint it with a critical or satirical perspective.’

And yet, I suggest, his paintings still hold a strong affinity for the world of fashion. ‘Absolutely. I’m like a thwarted lover, because I love fashion but I have a deep distrust for the illusions that so often it can contribute to. There’s a strong ambivalence and melancholy to the way I paint my subjects.’

That sense of illusion and melancholy permeates the paintings in Schofield’s new exhibition, in particular the show’s titular work. It depicts a young woman proudly occupying the centre of the enormous painting in the midday sun, spraying a hosepipe in front of her swimming pool. Summer, just like in the idealised images Schofield is referencing, is suspended, as if to be never-ending. Schofield paints the subject with as much admiration as he does scepticism for the impossibility of the young woman’s confidence in the glamorous world she occupies and her defiance of anything that might threaten to intrude.

‘The Defiance of Summer’ is at Vivienne Roberts Projects, London, from 30 September to 21 November 2025, viviennerobertsprojects.com