John McLean New Zealand Artist

John McLean, award-winning artist of Urenui, is a man of well-constructed sentences, full of meaning and depth. When he talks, you want to listen - as much as he wants you to.

 McLean and his wife Chris live a peaceful existence, here by the sea at Pukearuhe, where they've been for 28 years, 21 of those in a yellow house they built themselves.

How I got Here

It was Smither who originally launched McLean as a super-realist, which he remained for twenty years. "By that time I felt I was getting into the work, but it was getting hard," McLean says. "I'd begun to procrastinate, drink too much coffee...the appetite wasn't there, and I knew that something else..."

 McLean doesn't immediately finish his sentence. It's obvious that it's important for him to find the exact words he needs to account for what was happening inside him at the time, urging him beyond all his known familiar boundaries.

 In the end, he simply sits his hands on his knees, palms upwards, in humble supplication, and says, "I knew that there was another voice in me that wanted to be heard."

 It was on this verge of change that McLean developed a strong interest in Carl Jung and the other great philosophers, and began to explore the idea of that alternate voice being the only true one.  "I took the view that the artist John knew what it wanted and the conscious John had to listen and find out more."

 To do this, he devised all kinds of bizarre means to access this other voice - working half-blindfolded so he couldn't see what he was painting, sidestepping the strengths he had to unleash something new and original. As he says, "I dismantled what I knew and tried to break through that way."