Mark McPadden was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1972. He graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1994 with a BA honours degree in fine art drawing and painting. Directly after graduating, McPadden was a recipient of the Elisabeth Greenshields award.

In 1996, after moving to London, he was awarded third prize in the BP National Portrait Award, for the painting Il Papa. Brian Sewell wrote in the Evening Standard on the 8th 1996.

"The third prize has gone to a far more remarkable portrait. Mark McPadden, at, 23 offers the life size image of an old man seated on a dais, clad only in a shirt, tie and heavy undercoat, his feet bare; the pose suggests wisdom and quiet authority, yet, sympathetically, it has been subverted into an allegory of age, of crumbling flesh and senile mind, of vacant eyes that see nothing more real than the fragmented hauntings of long memory, reflected in the ghostly shadows on the wall. It is, perhaps, more picture than portrait for it tells of far weightier things than the naive charting of features that won £10,000 but the head is true enough as observed portraiture......... only with Mark McPadden does my choice correspond with that of the judges."

McPadden's keen interest of the techniques and working methods of the Old Masters led him the city of Florence, Italy, to study at the Florence Academy of Art in 1999. He lived in this city, famous for the birth of the Renaissance, until 2005.

Mark McPadden only works from life. He grinds his own paint and prepares all his own varnishes and mediums to traditional recipes His influences include Rembrandt, Rubens, Velasquez, Caravagio, Ribera and Tiziano.

The penultimate work is unquestionably Memorandium Mortis- the death mask of his father.

He has exhibited in group shows and his work is in numerous private collections in Britain. He currently lives and works in Budapest, Hungary.