Whilst many a taxi driver no doubt gets bored whilst waiting between fares, Clapham born Mark McGowan decided to put his spare time to good use and turned himself into ‘The Artist Taxi Driver’ in 2010. This self-employed eccentric shares satirical videos attacking political parties and injustice with his 59,000 subscribers on YouTube on a daily basis and he never fails to rise to the occasion. He has 120,000 followers on Twitter, is an ex-football hooligan,an ex-associate lecturer at the Chelsea College of Art and now sells his own works (painted on newspapers) online also. Refused entry to the Frieze Art Fair for five nights in 2010 for rightly daring to suggest it was elitist, “passionate ranter” McGowan champions the belief that “the role of art is to challenge.” He counts Frankie Boyle, George Galloway, John McDonnell and Ricky Tomlinson amongst those he’s interviewed in his taxi and was described in the Guardian in 2015 as producing “online polemics” that are “moving traffic.”
