John McLean thought the job of an artist was to serve art and develop the tradition starting from the ideas and discoveries of his predecessors. He pointed to the directness of Louis and Noland, Jack Bush's chunks of floating colour, Perehudoff's saturated hues, Miro's coloured spaces and the subtle animation in space of the coloured shapes in Matisse's "Snail”. He was a great colourist and as a poet of the optic nerve, placed his work in the service of colour itself.
When beginning a painting, he always had a plan but was open and alert to improvisation as the means to discover something unforeseen and new. He explored a relatively restricted range of shape to continuously surprising effect. Even at his most insouciant, when his work sang as the bird sings, every mark, even an apparent splash or chance event seems to have landed in the perfect place. John valued drawing both in the relationships between his coloured objects and the dramatisation of the coloured spaces they swam in. His drawing was also inextricably bound up with how the paint was put on, its solidity or transparency and the nature of the edges of forms. Looking over his whole oeuvre, one can see his disegno, in the sense of the overall interrelationship of the coloured forms, developing and deepening and there was always a dynamic and a wonderful sense of lightness and wit. This mastery of drawing and design is particularly clear in his canvas collages, sculptures and stained-glass windows.
John’s was an art of generosity, disguising his hard work with a mastery of technique and a sense of ease fulfilling Dr Johnson’s view of the purpose of art “to enable (us) better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
London
September, 2019
