At the age of 25, Taranaki artist John McLean decided to chuck in his career as a teacher and become a full-time artist. Early in his artistic career he adopted an observational, analytical style. He became well known for his works depicting chooks and trees as well as pigs; a preliminary sketch of the latter features in this sketchbook. After about 25 years he began to tire of this approach to art, saying it became like "cooking to a recipe and producing just another cake". He began to move towards a more intuitive approach that used the unconscious mind as inspiration. Initially this resulted in work inspired by Cubism, before he moved to creating allegorical work, produced in story-like sequences. He says of his development as a painter, “The background visual vocabulary I developed in my years of landscape painting has provided an invaluable context from which my paintings can speak, as they attempt to glimpse archetypal dimensions within the human condition.”
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