It was a nail that started it all. “I wanted a painting to hang on it,” says John Maclean, former keyboard player with the Beta Band and award-winning film director. He nods towards a wall in his home studio in London where the lonely piece of metal still protrudes. Maclean has found it difficult to fulfil his mission: at first, because he wasn’t entirely happy with the paintings he was producing; more recently, because people keep buying them.
Becoming a professional artist at the age of 50 was not intentional. Like a lot of people, Maclean found himself painting during the pandemic just for something to do. At the time, he was casting for his second film – a follow-up to 2015’s Sundance-winning western Slow West – when everything ground to a halt. He sourced some old postcards on eBay, zoomed in on peripheral parts of the landscape that caught his eye (a tree, a waterfall) and tried to replicate them – applying the paint thickly (you wouldn’t guess they were watercolours) on to wooden panels using a psychedelic palette reminiscent of Hockney’s iPad spring paintings. Today, Maclean has arranged several on the floor in front of us, disconcertingly nudging them around with his feet as we talk. “Ah well,” he says, giving one a boot. “They’re made of wood.”
