22 – 26 April 2020

Lindsey Jean Mclean is a figurative painter from Edinburgh. Mclean studied Painting and Printmaking was at Glasgow School of Art from 2009 to 2013. Mclean’s GSA degree show work was exhibited in New Scottish Artists in the Royal Scottish Academy. Mclean also studied on The Drawing Year at The Royal Drawing School (2013-14). She is currently in her first year of MFA Painting at Slade School of Fine Art. McLean is a recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant, which is a distinguished award for emerging figurative artists worldwide.

The painting Feathers has been one of the works I have created during the lockdown. The sensuality and texture forms the subject. The figures are involved in the sensations, however the hand that is the main active part of the painting is going through rather than meeting something solid. There is a feeling of not being able to fully grasp something and feeling of tactile loss. This a theme that I have seen reoccurring in my work during this period of time, some of the characters are surround by tactile objects such as feather boas but the are ultimately individually framed and alone. 

Like feathers they can form a body, a whole, a bird, but separately they become flexible, light and no longer a bird but a subject themselves. In this time that I have been slowing down and reflecting on the images of the women in paintings that have come before, what it means to be part of this bigger whole. Female nudes historically are passive; I feel in my paintings I am reclaiming an agency.

Feathers
Watercolour on black watercolour paper
51 x 38 cm

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