"Distancing" Painting

Canadian painter Ian McLean studied at the University of Guelph with an additional period of study in London, England. He has exhibited widely in Canada and his work is found in collections internationally. McLean has been the recipient of multiple Ontario Arts Council grants and was recently a contestant on the reality series “Landscape Artist of the Year: Canada” on CBC TV.

McLean's paintings are rooted in the architecture of mid twentieth century houses – structures that, for him, evoke a specific cultural memory yet feel suspended in time. These homes, both familiar and elusive, serve as vessels for nostalgia, longing, and the unknown. Each painting is a meditation on control and its limits. Colour is central to his process. He uses unexpected, sometimes otherworldly colour as a form of allure and disruption. The palette becomes a language of its own – expressing what memory distorts, forgets, or transforms. Ultimately, his practice is about the blur between worlds - between the constructed and the organic, the known and the mysterious, the remembered and the imagined.