John McClenaghen
Fine Artist

El Walker of Caskshare Q&A with John McClenaghen

Can you tell us a bit about your background and inspiration as an artist.

 
I am descended from farmers on my mother’s side but I grew up in a town, so the farms I visited my relatives on seemed to be full of fascinating shapes and colours that never became my mundane everyday. My paintings of the land and the sea, allow me to express an experience of place and often to reconnect with my past. Painting is often a process of re experiencing something seemingly lost through the application of colour and mark. I tend to pursue the things you can’t easily represent in painting, like wind or rain, shifts in light and colour and the ever present movement that changes landscape from something seen to something felt. My wildflower and garden paintings are really the landscape in close up and like the landscapes and coast scapes they explore the struggle between our cultivation of the land and the endless resurgence of nature.
 
I am inspired by the changing landscape and coast, by the changes that happen moment to moment, how they build up in your mind until a scene becomes an experience. The landscape embodies a rich visual history, shaped by the lives of so many organisms including ourselves, constantly remaking what we encounter there. It’s also a material history that an artist can connect with as their brush follows a line of fence posts or the outline of some farm buildings. I am an expressive colourist painter harnessing the fluidity and dynamism of the medium to convey experience.
 
Tell us a little about your design for Caskshare.

An Eternity of Borrowed Time is about the short, but beautiful lives of flowers and how their transitory beauty can seemingly last for an eternity in paintings. When you paint flowers you are always on borrowed time, as you watch them begin to bloom you also know how quickly they will fade. I painted them seen from a field left fallow, at the boundary of field and garden where these cultivated plants meet the wider world of wild resurgent nature.
 
What’s your process for creating a piece like this?

The idea began, like many of my ideas, sitting drawing and painting in a field and thinking about the interaction of field and garden where one meets the other. I wanted to paint the wildflowers, garden flowers and grasses on the border separating two contrasting environments as they changed and interacted over time. To make a painting that would express this struggle for space and light and sustenance in these short, but beautiful lives. A small unnoticed drama. Paintings happen in layers, not only of materials but also of time. Your attempt to paint something is inevitably a layering of attempts to express your feelings about it. So when your subject is also constantly changing, the interaction between the two offers endless opportunities to capture this in a changing surface of colour and mark.
 
What’s next for you and how can people reach you?
 
It’s an exciting time for me. I am just coming to the end of an artists residency that enabled me to make some large, ambitious pieces. I am painting full time and working toward a number of exhibitions with galleries in Scotland and in London and also had work selected for the recent Beep Painting Biennial.

You can see my paintings in a number of galleries over the next few months. They are currently at Whitehouse Gallery (@whitehousegalleryscotland), in Kirkcudbright until 21st June, at Eion Stewart Fine Art (@_eionstewartfineart) in Stonehaven until 31st May, The Biscuit Factory (@thebiscuitfactorygallery) in Newcastle until 20th July and at ScotlandArt (@scotlandartgallery) Glasgow until 6th September.

My work will also be at the Russell Gallery in London, 26 June to August 30th for their summer exhibition, the Lemond Gallery in Glasgow (@thelemondgallery) Saturday 6th June to Sunday 15th June, at Fidra Fine Art (@fidrafineart) Gullane 28th June to 31st August, Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Glasgow (@rogerbillcliffegallery) from 4th JulyGraystone Gallery Festival Exhibition (@graystonegallery) in Edinburgh 18th July - 30th August, The Strathearn Gallery, Crieff (@strathearngallery) 21st June - 31st August and at Green Gallery (@greengallerylifestyle) in Buchlyvie, Stirlingshire 21st September to 12th October.

You can follow my work on social media:
Instagram: @johnmcclenaghen
Facebook: @JohnMcClenaghenartist
X @JohnMcClenaghen

​
​​