John McClenaghen

I was born in Falkirk, Scotland and now live in Wrexham.

I am the Grandson of a ploughman and nephew to a shepherd and a Grieve, or farm foreman, and my way of looking at my main creative subject - the landscape - has been informed by being part of a Scottish farming family on my mother’s side. As a child I viewed my world with wonder, I grew up in a town but my uncles remained in farming and I would visit them with my parents which felt like moving between two very different worlds, perhaps heightening my experience of both and providing a way of seeing the world that remained with me into adulthood.

My work explores weather time and change within the landscape and coast. I am interested in painting’s ability to relate experience by drawing parallels between the action of light and weather upon my subjects and the action of colour and mark upon the canvas. Through the rhythm of work I try to move from the representation of something seen to the reconstruction of something felt.

I almost always work with colour from the outset, something that goes right back to my time as a student at the Glasgow School of Art. I have always been interested in the landscape and coast and the ways they are transformed by the changing weather of each season. I tend to return to the same locations repeatedly as I establish a relationship with the space over time by working directly from nature. The traces of layers, of decisions in the drawn and painted surface, recall changes I see in the landscape itself, the reconfiguration of structures, shapes, colours and textures reflecting fluctuating physical forms obscured or revealed by the effects of colour and light, which in turn conveys my physical, emotional and psychological experience of a place.

I have strong childhood memories of the farms my relatives worked, one of which was on the east coast of Scotland so my fascination with such places no doubt dates from then.

I studied at the Glasgow School of Art, the University of Huddersfield, University of Liverpool and the University of Chester and I was until 2020 Programme Leader for Fine Art in the School of Creative Arts, Glyndwr University. I then went part-time in order to focus more of my time on painting and exhibiting.

I now exhibit regularly and am currently represented by a number of galleries located throughout the UK.

I also write about art practice with book chapters recently published by Q-Art and Black Dog, London and have presented papers on painting at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester and to the National Association for Fine Art Education.

Fountain Fine Art

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