John McLean
'Estate'

Acrylic on canvas
232.5 x 171 cm

John McLean was born in Liverpool in 1939. He studied at the University of St. Andrews 1957-62 and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London 1963-66. His first one-person exhibition was at the Talbot Rice Gallery Edinburgh, 1975. He was Artist in Residence at Edinburgh University 1985 and lived in New York 1987-89. Between 1988 and 1998 he held one-person exhibitions regularly at Francis Graham-Dixon Gallery London and since then he has shown regularly with Flowers East, London.

"I start a painting with a rough plan, but as the work develops I adapt the plan or even abandon it altogether. Important as they are, planning and experience are not as crucial as intuition and spontaneity. Like most painters, I depend on luck as well as knowledge.

I devise my shapes largely by making them respond to factors in the picture itself. Contrast is important: hard and soft edges, dark and light tone, opaque and translucent paint, mattness versus gloss, and so forth.

I stop when I think the painting is alive and answering back in some way. The manner in which it does this is always a surprise compared with the notion with which I began."