John McLean's is an eminently lucid art, remarkably so when you consider that one of his principal strategies was a determination to follow his hunches and remain open to possibilities. Of course, his procedure was not as simple as that, and in fact embodied a balance between planning (which he termed “tactical management”) and chance, helping to ensure that the end result could stil surprise him, as well as the viewer. (An important consideration.) Another contradiction, for his paintings were also deeply felt and pondered. But then, as Goethe said, we are fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions. And McLean was certainly fruitful.
Particular motifs recurred: the crown, spiral, crescent and lozenge, along with triangles, curvy quadrilaterals and irregular ovals, tumbling through fields of force that held them gently but inexorably in place. From the work emanated a feeling that this artist enjoyed juggling with his forms as much as he relished manipulating paint that was both succulent and succinct. He was also expert at evoking the fall and shimmer of light and the play of colour, and in this pursuit layering and re-painting were vital, along with the importance of edges and surface finish (matt or gloss). But each move had to be tested and counter-tested, it had to earn its place. He was in pursuit of - as he put it - revelation, not accumulation.
Language and music were both great pleasures to him, often overlapping like his dancing forms, and both fed into his painting with a minimum of pretension or fuss. I will remember him for his Rabelaisian joy in life, abiding generosity of spirit and the exceptionally high standards he set in his art. As he wrote of Euan Uglow in 1993: “Most painters merely make pictures. There is enough in the teeming past of art to give their work plausibility. Their audiences are as content as the artists to go through what is not much more than a ritual. The other painters stand out.” John McLean is one of the few who stand out.
Devizes, September, 2019
