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.