John McClenaghen
'These paintings are a celebration of nature’s abundance and of the cycle of life.
I am the Grandson of a ploughman and nephew to a shepherd and a Grieve, or farm foreman and my way of looking at the landscape has been informed by being part of a Scottish farming family on my mother’s side. As a child I viewed my world with wonder, I grew up in a town but my uncles remained in farming and I would visit them with my parents which felt like moving between two very different worlds, perhaps heightening my experience of both and providing a way of seeing the world that remained with me into adulthood.
I studied Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art in the 1980’s where in the first year my head spun with all the possibilities this education offered in the interactions of materials, of colour, line and a diversity of media creating synergies with my surroundings through which I genuinely found a new way of seeing the world. I explored drawing on a monumental scale, mixed media and assemblage even film, eventually returning to painting with a new found wonder at its uncanny ability to capture the sensations and dynamism of the world around us and to relate human experience.
The land offers a rich visual history of what we leave behind. This is a material history that can be touched as your brush follows a line of fence posts or the outline of some farm buildings. It’s a tapestry of lives of so many organisms including ourselves, all reshaping what we encounter there. But how do you paint something like that?
Something must form there in that surface conversation. I believe I only start to see a place properly as I draw or paint it. It’s not there in my head before I go out into the field and it’s not there in the things I initially see there either. They just get me started. As I move the paint it’s a process of having a conversation with what is going on in a transitory moment in a moving, changing landscape. Expressing something like that would suggest that the painted surface also needs to also be a moving changing thing.
The wonder I continue to feel alone in the landscape and the way I find I can express it in paint is about the physical contact with a material that, through the rhythm of work can begin to resonate with the physical world and for me that is when painting begins.
In an era dominated by the moving image painting could seem too static a medium to trap the energy and dynamism of a living landscape and the authentic trace of life. But as you are delineating the structure of a hedge or finding the right tone for a line of rooftops something inexplicable is slipping between the layers of actions like an alchemical process changing thought and feeling into material and you have to listen and respond.
I use an extensive range of implements and actions to keep pace with what nature is doing. It’s not simply about picture making, although that plays a part, it’s about finding what it is possible to say and how it is possible to say it in the medium of paint. Through the rhythm of work, I am trying to move from the representation of something seen to the reconstruction of something felt.'