John McLean: Momentum

"...undecided whether to study art history or practice, but eager for London, John had applied to the Slade School and Courtauld Institute. Both accepted him... London meant life with Jan, painting afresh in the hub of things and the excitement of the Courtauld Institute." pg.32

"The work of colour-field and acrylic pioneers Noland, Louis, Jules Olitski and Friedel Dzubas - all impacting on the subsequent McLean career - was first encounted in 1960s London at landmark shows in commerical venues such as Kasmin and at Bryan Robertson's Whitechapel Gallery. He was learning by looking and doing." pg.40

"[1965] saw a joint exhibition with fellow Courtauld student Michael McLeod at the A.I.A. gallery in London's Soho... There was also a favourable review in the Guardian by its new art critic Norbert Lynton - who compounded the compliment by buying two paintings. He wrote: 'John McLean's ten paintings and collages come under the heading of Op Art in that he exploits conflicting colours that shift and pulsate, but he joins to this not very noteworthy function programmes of pattern modulation and transformation that lift his pictures out of the run of eye twisters. And, in fact, some of his work is gentleness itself." pg.40

"The paint I used was a mix of artist's acrylic with house painter's white emulsion which went on flat: no brush strokes. A lot of contemporary work I looked at had a beautifully made mechincal look. Often it was in black and white, but I was interested in closed-toned colour contrasts. The greenish yellow ground of Quadrillion and the warm blue squares are near enough complementary to be lively but not so obvious as to kill the harmony. 

Although the squares lie still, parallel to the picture edges, they also, because of the way they are grouped, seem to move diagonally backwards and forwards. I wasn't aware of it at the time but, with hindsight, that visual ambiguity was to be a constant in my painting. - John McLean" pg.45

"Then, for the summer of 1981, John quit a part-time teaching post at Winchester College of Art with his old and dear friend Gillian Ayres, to become guest artist at the University of Saskatchewan's Emma Lake workshop. Founded in 1936, the gathering had grown into a major international creative exchange with visiting critics, curators, painters and sculptors...

With further visits over ensuing summers, Saskatchewan's Saskatoon city came to rival New York in its influence. In a letter to Jan he wrote of having his work 'satisfactorily bright and bold'... Prairie panoramas were soon suggested in elongated canvases bathed in a light ranging from glowing to searing." pg.62

"In summer 1987 the McLeans moved to New York and stayed for two years - John working in a huge Soho loft...

The New York move ultimately led to a big breakthrough - back in London. A 1988 debut at the Francis Graham-Dixon Gallery in Clerkenwell comprised a selection of American paintings. Tim Hilton asked in the Guardian: 'Surely there is no other British artist with a comparable desire to produce paintings of sheer and utter beauty?'...

Hilton saw a characteristic McLean painting of that moment as having 'swathes of pigment that shelter or enclose a lighter-coloured area, which might be a rough, sprawled rectangle or an open wedge-like triangle. Such areas are usually lighter because they are the canvas itself, unpainted. Within them, they have long, bold, separated marks of colour. One must read the colour abstractly, but there is none the less a metaphor in the format. Since the inner components of the painting are in a higher key than their embraing swathes the effect is of exposure and display; and this is a device of Western art that goes back at least as far as Titian, whose paintings often flung back sumptuous curtains to reveal a central feature, and thus concentrate on it...'

'McLean's painterly hand does not impose: it seems to elicit what the canvas and the pigment are in themselves. Here is one of his modern masteries. Old-master paintings, embalmed beneath their dense finishes, have the look of finality and of definite empirical knowledge. Modern painting is by contrast insubstantial. McLean's abstraction goes further: it says that optical experience is the most delicate and fleeting knowledge that is given to the human senses.'

Back in Britain, at the end of that decade enriched by the grandeur of North America, John McLean was to conclude:

'I want a simple heroic style like Raphael or Michelangelo. I don't want little details. I'm interested in big effects." pp.65-67

On Strathspey, 1993 (Glasgow Museums):

"The huge 1992 Matisse retrospective in New York was very moving. So was the Miró show in Barcelona soon afterwards. But for the previous decade I had also been looking at the painting of Bill Perehudoff, the Canadian abstract artist, whose colour intrigued me. I longed to use absolutely saturated hues as he did and by the time I painted Strathspey I could.

The upper circle is the white ground, in a sense a hole in the more brushy black field. But some of the bright colours overlap the black, so the hole seems to move forward on to the same plane as the black. White will always come forward, no matter what, but my ground here is a flat white and would be in a sense obviously behind the slightly translucent black brushed on top. Spatial tension is central to my work." pg.85

“Since 1992 John McLean’s paintings have evolved in a dramatic direction after twin big-bang convulsions. Previously he had tended to play with combinations of close-valued colour. Now black becomes as central to his work as it was to that of two of his heroes: Goya and Manet…

Epiphany for McLean came via the Matisse retrospective curated by John Elderfield at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in autumn 1992, and the Miró centenary show, in Barcelona, the following spring. The effect on McLean, a fan of both artists, was electrifying as he began to perceive the positive possibilities of black as a colour rather than a dark value. Lustre could lift any composition – especially with mica added to the pigment in the formulations of Sam Golden. And if black did have a quietening and darkening presence, then surely it served only to make other colours brighter and livelier?” pg.100