Living Arrangements: Sublimation, Decor, and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Paintings of Ian McLean
By Eliza Griffiths, Montreal
-originally published in the exhibition catalogue "Ian McLean: Living Arrangements" (2005)
-republished in "Hamilton Arts & Letters" (Samizdat Press), (2010)
I stand surreptitiously by the beaded curtain, looking in on the scene. I feel like a voyeur, both hidden and noticed. The screen is merely a collection of confidently painted brightly coloured pigment, yet I am convinced. What is going on in there? Is that chair for me? I'm going in.
Ian McLean's paintings are beautiful. Sumptuous portraits of domestic interiors; remarkable furniture; figurines; sexy lamps; and pieces of cake painted so lushly they create a kind of visual onomatopoeia that verges on the fetishistic. They are images of a certain cultural identity, not fixed, but evocative and rich with associative meaning. Throughout McLean's work there is a pervading sense of interiority, privacy, and decorum which makes me think of my identity as a Canadian. Vestiges of our own version of Victorian repression and sublimation linger in the variously tasteful, funky, nostalgic representations of these objects of desire. In McLean's work the socio-cultural psyche is examined from both inside and out.
On one level the body of paintings that make up “Living Arrangements” could be read as a kind of loving homage to beautiful or remarkable pieces of domestic industrial design. Although McLean's attraction to his subjects is palpable, his renderings are laced with a subtle irony and a dimension of critical detachment. His gaze is complex and his paintings are laden with subtext. McLean has described his interest in decoration and ornamentation as a kind of examination of late 20 th century materialism. In a consumer culture that links success and well-being to the endless accumulation of products. Mclean sees ornamentation as part of an artificial means of trying to establish identity. By design, we attempt to convey to ourselves and others, an impression of success, good taste, and contentment, through the arrangement of our surrounding environments. The paintings are not a denial of our need for comfort, pleasure and beauty in our lives, but a critique of ‘lifestyle' suppressing and supplanting actual living, meaningful experience, and a deeper understanding of identity.
This notion of decoration as distraction also relates to a kind of refusal or inability to confront messy or difficult aspects of being human. These visions of domestic interiors are carefully composed, controlled environments. Inside, lamps establish mood at a touch and only illuminate what you want others and yourself to see. What they don't illuminate they conceal in shadow. Patterns entertain the eye while they do double-duty by helping to hide annoying stains and imperfections. The upholstery and cushioning comforts and cradles, absorbing sound and providing a softer experience.
Few of McLean's paintings make any visual reference to the outside world which reinforces the insular, protected feel of the spaces. His choices of objects, furnishings, and his palette, are simultaneously nostalgic and contemporary, giving the work an interesting quality of temporal indeterminacy. This strange sense of timelessness lends itself to the concept of creating carefully-controlled surroundings as a kind of panacea for the challenges of living. This taken to extremes becomes the ersatz reality of the casino environment where there are no clocks or windows, no day, no night, no weather.
This artificial world enables you to suspend reality and live entirely perspective-free in ultimate escapism. Although much more subtle and complex, one of McLean's primary interests in his paintings has been to examine the “ways in which we make ourselves feel better through artificial means”, whether that be food, or the collecting of objects of desire, this drive speaks to misdirected, often desperate attempts to find emotional fulfillment and meaning in life.
It is interesting that Ian McLean's paintings, which are largely devoid of human figures, are so deeply imbued with human presence. More often than not, the artist has positioned the viewer within the pictorial spaces represented, creating an immediate relationship to the scene that is somewhat intimate and disconcerting. Are we awkward guests or nosy interlopers? If, as McLean suggests, his compositions can be related to stage sets, then did we just stumble onto the stage during the lamp's soliloquy? This tension of unrealized action is loaded in many of McLean 's paintings and there is a compelling connection to film, television, and theatre, both of the humorous and `noir' variety. Some of the paintings convey a feeling of heavy, pregnant silence, the kind that suggests an overbearing sense of decorum is invisibly enforced. In McLean 's hands the inanimate objects become animate, multi-tasking as quasi fetish objects, repositories of sublimated emotional needs, and as personified protagonists who are ready to talk.
McLean's interest in the sublimation of potentially messy and complicated human needs into tidy, ordered material worlds, finds direct visual correspondence in his paintings. Paint after all, is a messy substance that is difficult to control and his approach to the imagery and materiality of his paintings contains these negotiations beautifully. Moving back and forth between finely rendered representation, formal abstraction, and painting's most expressive impulses, McLean has cited such diverse influences on his work as Edouard Manet; American Abstract Expressionism; and tenets of Modernist ‘utopian' design. It is the collision of these various approaches to painting and image-making that makes McLean's paintings so strong. As attentively observed objects and compositions find themselves under attack from expressive passages of irrational paint, there is a disruption of the illusion of banal perfection and convention. McLean's paintings remind us that surface veneer is much more interesting as a complement rather than a containment of the untidiness of being human.
By Eliza Griffiths, Montreal
-originally published in the exhibition catalogue "Ian McLean: Living Arrangements" (2005)
-republished in "Hamilton Arts & Letters" (Samizdat Press), (2010)
I stand surreptitiously by the beaded curtain, looking in on the scene. I feel like a voyeur, both hidden and noticed. The screen is merely a collection of confidently painted brightly coloured pigment, yet I am convinced. What is going on in there? Is that chair for me? I'm going in.
Ian McLean's paintings are beautiful. Sumptuous portraits of domestic interiors; remarkable furniture; figurines; sexy lamps; and pieces of cake painted so lushly they create a kind of visual onomatopoeia that verges on the fetishistic. They are images of a certain cultural identity, not fixed, but evocative and rich with associative meaning. Throughout McLean's work there is a pervading sense of interiority, privacy, and decorum which makes me think of my identity as a Canadian. Vestiges of our own version of Victorian repression and sublimation linger in the variously tasteful, funky, nostalgic representations of these objects of desire. In McLean's work the socio-cultural psyche is examined from both inside and out.
On one level the body of paintings that make up “Living Arrangements” could be read as a kind of loving homage to beautiful or remarkable pieces of domestic industrial design. Although McLean's attraction to his subjects is palpable, his renderings are laced with a subtle irony and a dimension of critical detachment. His gaze is complex and his paintings are laden with subtext. McLean has described his interest in decoration and ornamentation as a kind of examination of late 20 th century materialism. In a consumer culture that links success and well-being to the endless accumulation of products. Mclean sees ornamentation as part of an artificial means of trying to establish identity. By design, we attempt to convey to ourselves and others, an impression of success, good taste, and contentment, through the arrangement of our surrounding environments. The paintings are not a denial of our need for comfort, pleasure and beauty in our lives, but a critique of ‘lifestyle' suppressing and supplanting actual living, meaningful experience, and a deeper understanding of identity.
This notion of decoration as distraction also relates to a kind of refusal or inability to confront messy or difficult aspects of being human. These visions of domestic interiors are carefully composed, controlled environments. Inside, lamps establish mood at a touch and only illuminate what you want others and yourself to see. What they don't illuminate they conceal in shadow. Patterns entertain the eye while they do double-duty by helping to hide annoying stains and imperfections. The upholstery and cushioning comforts and cradles, absorbing sound and providing a softer experience.
Few of McLean's paintings make any visual reference to the outside world which reinforces the insular, protected feel of the spaces. His choices of objects, furnishings, and his palette, are simultaneously nostalgic and contemporary, giving the work an interesting quality of temporal indeterminacy. This strange sense of timelessness lends itself to the concept of creating carefully-controlled surroundings as a kind of panacea for the challenges of living. This taken to extremes becomes the ersatz reality of the casino environment where there are no clocks or windows, no day, no night, no weather.
This artificial world enables you to suspend reality and live entirely perspective-free in ultimate escapism. Although much more subtle and complex, one of McLean's primary interests in his paintings has been to examine the “ways in which we make ourselves feel better through artificial means”, whether that be food, or the collecting of objects of desire, this drive speaks to misdirected, often desperate attempts to find emotional fulfillment and meaning in life.
It is interesting that Ian McLean's paintings, which are largely devoid of human figures, are so deeply imbued with human presence. More often than not, the artist has positioned the viewer within the pictorial spaces represented, creating an immediate relationship to the scene that is somewhat intimate and disconcerting. Are we awkward guests or nosy interlopers? If, as McLean suggests, his compositions can be related to stage sets, then did we just stumble onto the stage during the lamp's soliloquy? This tension of unrealized action is loaded in many of McLean 's paintings and there is a compelling connection to film, television, and theatre, both of the humorous and `noir' variety. Some of the paintings convey a feeling of heavy, pregnant silence, the kind that suggests an overbearing sense of decorum is invisibly enforced. In McLean 's hands the inanimate objects become animate, multi-tasking as quasi fetish objects, repositories of sublimated emotional needs, and as personified protagonists who are ready to talk.
McLean's interest in the sublimation of potentially messy and complicated human needs into tidy, ordered material worlds, finds direct visual correspondence in his paintings. Paint after all, is a messy substance that is difficult to control and his approach to the imagery and materiality of his paintings contains these negotiations beautifully. Moving back and forth between finely rendered representation, formal abstraction, and painting's most expressive impulses, McLean has cited such diverse influences on his work as Edouard Manet; American Abstract Expressionism; and tenets of Modernist ‘utopian' design. It is the collision of these various approaches to painting and image-making that makes McLean's paintings so strong. As attentively observed objects and compositions find themselves under attack from expressive passages of irrational paint, there is a disruption of the illusion of banal perfection and convention. McLean's paintings remind us that surface veneer is much more interesting as a complement rather than a containment of the untidiness of being human.