MacLean, Andy

I am a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (2000), currently living in northeastern Nova Scotia. I teach drawing and painting at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish.

Artist Statement

Landscape is a well-established genre in the tradition of painting. While working with the landscape may preclude the modernist preoccupation of searching for an innovative or clever subject, it allows the artist to develop with references and responses to a rich inheritance and to make progress based on earlier conventions. What presents itself is a deep consideration of technique. For a painter, great art is produced by a balanced examination of materials and subject; something painted well is not simply an accurate physical description of a specific place, but a means to convey insights or observations given through the application of the medium.

There is a candor in limiting one's subject matter to their immediate surroundings. Painting thus becomes a simple marriage of the circumstance of place and the artist's materials. As a representational painter, I feel a kind of satisfaction with the appearance of nature, but the work must also be a manifestation of the medium, something that could not function in any other discipline.