Andrea McLean debuts long anticipated work at The Sanctuary Gallery, Newnham

I recently had the pleasure of chatting to Andrea online to gather a little more background to her art.

Originally brought up living above the family owned Forest Bookshop in Coleford, Forest of Dean, Andrea now lives alone in the charming market town of Ledbury where she quietly spends her days immersed in her art practice and the enchanting stories and realms she paints. Her softly spoken voice and gentle manner mirror her modest attitude towards her accomplishments & successful career as an artist. This local connection led in part to her collaboration with The Sanctuary Gallery where the medieval timber structure complement her work beautifully.

The Mythos exhibition at The Sanctuary Gallery in Newnham will be debuting Andrea McLean’s new body of work with mythological mapping paintings and hand coloured etchings. Works explore the modern retelling of mythical stories with titles such as Pathways with Berries, Shield of Achilles and The Reflective Earth.

When I look at Andrea’s work, it fills me with wonder – wonder at how she created them, wonder as to what inspired the scenes, wonder at the story she is telling and wonder at all the details I feel compelled to look closely for and discover within the layers.

Her extraordinary paintings will have you utterly captivated by their stylised drawings, tiny details and multi layers of translucent muted tones which lend a timeless, dreamlike quality to the work. They feel mystical, mythological and steeped in history and ancient legends. A treat of storytelling through exquisite pictures and intricate mapping which is subtly meditative. Each painting is a journey of discovery translated with colours which feel very relatable to modern life. They have a feeling of both reverence and light heartedness to them which makes you feel as if you’ve come across a truly exceptional artist who will stand the test of time.

Andrea (b.1968) is a traditionally trained fine artist having studied at Falmouth School of Art and the Slade, after which she held a scholarship at the British School at Rome. She works in a variety of media, including oil painting and etching and shares these skills as with students at The Royal Drawing School as a faculty tutor contributing to courses with mapping and mythological themes.

Andrea has worked as an artist-in-residence at both Gloucester and Hereford Cathedrals whose ecclesiastical settings complement and inspire her work. Notably, her Mappa Mundi painting is in the British Library Collection and can be seen on the third floor of the library outside the Map Room. She’s been featured in a variety of prestigious publications and art journals and won prizes at Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the Jerwood Drawing Prize.

Stemming from her childhood spent exploring the family bookshop after hours, she has a more scholarly approach to her art practice, spending a lot of time in libraries first researching her theme or topic and exploring manuscripts, legends and maps in order to develop a sense of connection to the past which she will translate through her paintings. Her sketchbooks – or atlases as she describes them – add to the process and are filled with colour, layers, imagery and writing which serve as a record, journal and visual experimentation to inspire her final pieces. With such an in depth background to her chosen subject, it’s no wonder her paintings are filled with such intricate, meandering detail.

She begins each painting with translucent abstract layers with colours relating to her upbringing amongst nature in the Forest of Dean or places she’s travelled to like Italy, India and Mexico before adding figurative elements as the painted story develops, overlaps and journeys across the page. Across her paintings you will discover similar shapes or figures moving in a certain way and become aware of a sense of light through the imagery which really embodies her style of painting, creating quiet conversations within each piece.

Often referred to as a mapping artist or cosmographer, she happily explained what mapping in art means:

“ Mapping, as a way of drawing and painting, means working on a canvas or sheet of paper to create brush-marks or pencil-marks where intuition, thought and reflection make scenes or stopping points (nodes). The connecting lines, often meandering, become journeys of their own. Imaginary landscapes form, with cities, towns and pathways which may have the presence of a dream place, an experience of heightened visual awareness or visualised ideas about the future.”

Andrea’s house is configured & centred around supporting the needs and space of her art practice. One particular area of her old cottage hospital has an old ward room with high ceilings which she uses for working on large canvases but otherwise her living and workspace are so connected that she can just dip in and out as she wishes, allowing her to indulge in living the life of a full time artist – not as a job, but as an innate sense of being.

She adores the therapeutic benefit of painting, getting lost in the magical feeling and illustrative detail of her work, often working very close up to large canvases, following her intuition, being inspired by the art materials as much as the subject matter itself. Andrea feels extremely privileged to be able to paint every day, emphasizing the importance it plays in finding her place in the world by feeling spiritually connected to past and present culture, artists and poets through her exploration of a variety of art, maps, myths, prehistoric cave drawings and poetry which influence her work. Ultimately, her life as a person and artist is all about developing creative connection through a painted narrative and her work depicts that ethos perfectly.

When I asked gallery owner Sharon Harvey about how she felt about Andrea McLeans work she was a little lost for words but came up with three words to describe them : extraordinary, depth and intrigue. She went on to say:

“The first thing that struck me about Andrea’s work, is that I think her works are extraordinary – by which I mean, they’re very different. Different to what I have seen before. You can’t quite place them into a genre like landscape painting or portrait painting. I suppose if you were going to put them into any kind of genre it would be Mythology. For me they’re very narrative, the painting is telling a story but the story also feels just outside your grasp. They make you want to investigate further to find out what that painting is trying to tell you because it’s not immediately obvious yet you instinctively know that there is a narrative behind it. They do have a mythical element to them but I think to be fair, that’s because I know that rather than I’m looking at it. Andrea’s work is suggestive of tales rather than depicting a scene or fable. That’s why I like them so much because I know that they’re trying to tell me a story but they kind of leaving space for me to be able to do that myself.

The other thing about them is that there’s a lot of depth in them both in terms of that narrative but also in terms of how they are painted. She tends to paint in oil and she does lots of tiny, tiny little marks… so you might come across tiny little figures in them which you really have to look for. They’re not a painting that you can just glance at, read and make an assumption. They are paintings that pull you in; that make you want to look very closely.

The other word I would say to describe them is intrigue. I think that they in themselves, have a lot of intrigue, so again it is all about making you get closer to the painting; making you want to really explore it and try and see inside Andrea’s mind in terms of what she’s trying to tell you.

Tess Jaray, in her book wrote quite a nice piece about Andrea. She was a lecturer at the Slade when Andrea was there many years ago doing her Masters and she talks about a painting that she saw over the course of the two year period. She would see it every week when she went in to teach and noted how it to constantly seemed to evolve. I remember reading and thinking that it really fitted what I’m trying to say.”

Tess Jaray, Paintings: Mysteries and Confessions, Lenz Books

“This was a painting I wanted to get into, a world that I wanted to enter. The surface is teeming with all the shapes and forms and suggestions of things that suggest another world. It takes a little time to enter it – looking can sometimes be quite hard work. It makes me ask the question, how close is it possible to get into any painting? And reminds me also of that rather charming proposition by Wittgenstein that ‘…the world is everything that is the case’. In Andrea’s work this is explained. Everything here is the case. Because the way it’s painted and drawn and scratched, lightly, delicately, convinces you, yes, this is the case. Every one of these myriad marks has emerged, grown, from somewhere elemental in this artist. I don’t know if these events – birds and beasts, trees, flowers, suns, things within things, were a struggle for her to reach, or if they came teeming from her brush with little effort.”

I can’t encourage you enough to come out and see this exhibition as it’s truly fascinating and a rare treat of wonder. If you’d like to meet her and hear for yourself what inspires her practice and her momentum for creating, please book your place on the Artist Talk.

Mythos will run March 4th – 15th April, Tues 11-5pm and Sat 12-4pm at The Sanctuary Gallery, High Street, Newnham on Severn, GL14 1BB. The Artist Talk is on March 18^th 2.30-4.30pm (booking required).