Catherine
MacLean was born in Victoria, British Columbia in 1955 and
moved to Nova Scotia 1961. She studied art at Mount Allison
University in the 1970's and during the next fifteen years
her work in the commercial field included employment as
a courtroom artist with Global TV and staff cartoonist with
Atlantic Canada's Frank Magazine.
In 1994 MacLean graduated from the Nova Scotia College of
Art and Design with a BFA in Fine Art and has been painting
and exhibiting since then. Her work can be seen at The Secord
Gallery in Halifax, Galerie d'Avignon in Montreal and in
Toronto at Stimul'eye.
A recent review of her painting in Visual Arts News says
that MacLean's work "celebrates the thingness of things
and their relationship to lived experience.conceptually
fresh and visually appealing, 'Mop Up' is a painterly celebration
of jouissance in the mundane as well as an unapologetic
assertion that paint still has something to say."
ARTIST'S STATEMENT:
I am a painter who enjoys using paint
to transform the idea of the everyday objects I depict,
clothing, toys, mops and buckets, into vehicles for the
thoughts and feelings they inspire. I like to use the physical
qualities of the paint to aid in achieving this, collaging
it onto the canvas in chips or pouring it on and letting
it dry in pools stretching the reality as far into abstraction
as I am able without losing the familiar grounding of the
thing itself.
As a teacher my aim is to challenge
the student to find what he or she has to say about a subject
and then to help them learn how to best bring those ideas
forward. I see this task as one which is unique for each
student no matter what their level of experience may be.