Valerie McLean is an Artist, Educator, Mentor and Art Writer. She teaches Studio Practice and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art and is Course Leader for a yearlong Painting Course at Leith School of Art. She is a professional member of Visual Arts Scotland.
"At the heart of my practice lies a deep sense of connection to the natural landscape. Like the Romantic painters of the past, I seek to capture the awe-inspiring power and fragility of the world around us. However, this sense of wonder is tempered by a growing anxiety over the rapid transformation of our environment. As the landscape I experience visually shifts and evolves, I find myself grappling with the unsettling reality of the environmental crisis.
My paintings focus on the underlying emotional and psychological resonances that emerge in our interactions with the natural world. Working from life, memory, imagination, drawings and photographs my paintings probe the visual and conceptual relationships which emerge in the juxtaposition of opposing pictorial tropes and methods of paint application. Drawing references from the dream like and the everyday I explore how the materials of paint and visual imagery can create worlds where opposing elements, such as order and chaos, abstraction and figuration, dwell together.
My most recent paintings are built from a number of separate panels and are an in-depth exploration of place. In these new paintings spontaneous and abstract elements arise from an improvisational use of materials, colour, mark, and shape alongside more ‘realistically’ rendered forms. I let the work take its own course, welcoming the unforeseen and unpredictable, while drawing on the felt, and observed, experiences of spending significant periods of time exploring the natural landscape both near my home, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and further afield.
In these works, the interplay of painting, reality, memory and imagination combine to create visions of the landscape which oscillate between the melancholy and the hopeful".