WILL MACLEAN AND MARIAN LEVEN

My painting allows me to respond to this environment in the knowledge that I am part of a long history of people shaped by these conditions."

MARIAN LEVEN, Artist’s statement

Marian Leven burst on the Scottish art world in the early 1990s once she had brought up a family. With great vigour and enthusiasm, she has since then exhibited in over forty solo and group exhibitions. The pace of her development has been remarkable, particularly since she won the Noble Grossart first prize in 1997. Forsaking the expressionist realism of her earlier paintings, her newer pieces may look abstract but her main theme is, as ever, the Scottish landscape, weather and water. Passionate about her work, her creative process is characterised by spontaneity, energy and, above all, passion.

Will Maclean has long been hailed as one of Scotland’s leading artists with an international reputation. Undoubtedly he is the pre-eminent artist of the Scottish Highlands. He is famous for using found objects, which contribute to the story-telling aspect of his art, which often has rich layers of meaning and symbolism. His approach to his work is thoughtful and imaginative, with a slow concentration on pieces, which gradually evolve and are lovingly created with his consummate craft skills.

Extract from essay by Clara Young, Art Curator, McManus Galleries, Dundee

Artistic partnerships are rare enough so when two established, highly regarded artists (who also happen to be husband and wife) exhibit jointly, there is ample cause for anticipation and celebration.

Marian Leven and Will Maclean, who have been inseparable since they met as students at Gray’s School of Art in 1962, have joined forces in a show which affords an unusual opportunity to compare and contrast the work of both.

Marian Leven’s work is rooted in her own being as a mature, developed and developing adult, who is no stranger to pain and joy: emotions which can exist within us, simultaneously, each vying with the other for precedence, sometimes one or the other breaking through. That, primarily, is what Leven’s painting is `about’ and it is also why she paints. Although, initially, her work was rooted and based upon landscape, principally the light, movement and forms of the landscape of Scotland, her work has evolved to become what might be termed an internal mindscape, or what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called `inscape’: in other words, she takes landscape as a starting point around which emotions coalesce and are ultimately synthesized. It would be too literal and too simplistic to equate Leven’s darker paintings with darker moods and, conversely, work in lighter tones as consequently conveying lighter moods, but there is nonetheless, a relationship.

In a sequence such as `Haar’ – the title comes from the Scots word meaning `cold sea fog’ which, in turn, derived from a Norse word meaning `old’ or `grey’ – a range of `moods’ can be discerned. But apart from the clue given by the sequence’s title, there is little or nothing to allow the viewer to pin this down to any specific thing or action. Like music without lyrics, the experience of looking at these works is entirely abstracted from specific physical reference. They create a space where – as in music – surface, tone, texture, scale and shape all point the viewer to an intensely subjective experience which may or may not overlap with the artist’s. This series, and the other works on show here, were created in rapid succession, impulsively, intuitive and passionately over the past two years.

In this new series of works, Will Maclean has continued to explore his enduring themes. One work, `Franklin’s Voyage’ is born from Maclean’s fascination with exploration, in this case the doomed Franklin expedition, which foundered in the ice of northern Canada while searching for the North West Passage in 1847. The large, box-framed construction contains a mysterious object, visually akin, perhaps, to a whale or a bird. Its unreadability and ambiguity are deliberate because Maclean’s works, although in a sense narratives, also allow the viewer to participate in assembling their `meaning’. Maclean himself says that, often, the narrative content is only arrived at after completion of the work. In fact, the object in question here is a representation of the `walnut’ boats – portable, collapsible canvas-skinned boats – used by Franklin as an aid to exploration. This is further hinted at by the inclusion of actual walnut shells – metamorphosed into tiny boats – illustrating another of Maclean’s techniques: the combination of real and constructed objects, and a deliberate blurring of the boundaries between the two. There is a long art-historical lineage in such strategies, not least, the work of the American surrealist, Joseph Cornell, who also used the boxed construction as his narrative vehicle and who, Maclean freely acknowledges, “is never far away”.

Extract from an essay by Giles Sutherland, Art Historian (March 2004)