White Room: John Maclean

White Columns is proud to announce the first solo exhibition by the London-based, Scottish artist John Maclean. Maclean studied at London’s Royal College of Art between 1994 and 1996. He was a founding member of the legendary group The Beta Band (1996-2005), for whom he also directed a series of brilliantly idiosyncratic videos. In 2009 Maclean directed his first short film ‘Man On A Motorcycle’ starring Michael Fassbender. His feature film ‘Slow West’ was released to wide critical acclaim in 2015. After a long hiatus John Maclean returned to painting during the pandemic and started to post images of the resulting works to his Instagram account.

What follows is edited from an online conversation between White Columns’ Director Matthew Higgs and John Maclean in early March 2022.

Matthew Higgs: After studying at London’s Royal College of Art in the mid-1990s you became involved with The Beta Band. Did you put painting on hold during this era?

John Maclean: When we were in the studio recording, I always made sure I had a space for painting. There is so much waiting around when you are in a band. Most of what I made during that time was used as artwork for the covers and inside sleeves of The Beta Band’s albums.

MH: The Beta Band had a very particular aesthetic (both sonic and visual), that suggested an interest in folk-like, even outsider-ish forms of expression: one that seemed to run counter to the late-20^th century’s promise of technology?

JM: Our aim was to embrace technology but to keep our whole sound organic, not rigid. Even now when I listen to old house music – Marshall Jefferson’s ‘Move Your Body’ for example – there is something organic and awkward about it: a quality that give it its soul, its human-ness. With The Beta Band it was an attempt to combine current technology with organic, analog instrumentation in the most seamless way possible. The same rules applied to our use of photoshop with hand-cut elements in the collages that we used. We wanted the band’s magazine ‘The Flower Press,’ our music videos, our press pictures, and the overall aesthetic of the group to have an equal importance to the music. I’d always loved The Velvet Underground, The KLF, and to a lesser extent The Stone Roses, for this very reason.  

MH: After The Beta Band (and your subsequent band The Aliens) your focus shifted to filmmaking. Are there analogies to be drawn between your approach to filmmaking and your approach to painting?

JM: Painting is most like writing – in terms of its relationship to filmmaking. You need time to think and to experiment. It is essentially a lonely pursuit. Much of one’s time is spent on research, on dreaming, on false starts and minor breakthroughs. When it comes to actually shooting a film, it’s probably as far from painting as can be; making a film is all collaboration, a form of improvised madness, watching the clock, and shifting with the external circumstances. I love this social and chaotic aspect of filmmaking precisely because it’s the opposite of painting.

MH: Did you return to painting during the pandemic?

JM: I returned to painting during the pandemic, starting in 2020. My latest film was stalling, the funding was tricky to get together. It was amazing to return to painting with such strict boundaries. I decided from the outset that all the paintings would be the same small scale, that I would paint on my writing desk at home, and use only watercolors and collage, so our house would not get full of fumes! 

MH: How would you describe your approach to painting?

JM: When I was at the Royal College of Art, I was probably too young, but I also felt the pressure for my work to be about SOMETHING – e.g., politically, socially, etc. I ultimately didn’t know what to paint. I think I was too obsessed with what I thought of as ‘the new’ aesthetic, artists such as Martin Kippenberger or Mike Kelley, etc. I didn’t really appreciate the history of painting as much as I do now. The most liberating aspect of making paintings during the lockdown, was simply deciding to paint whatever the hell I wanted, just for me. The imagery was mostly sourced from the internet. I gravitated towards images that were often badly printed, or images that had been hand-tinted. I wanted to try to paint something real – e.g., a landscape – but I was not interested in painting an actual landscape, rather I was very consciously painting from a photograph of a landscape. Many of the resulting paintings are based on imagery taken from old postcards, where I tend to focus-in on the backgrounds, zooming-in, re-framing them, so they become more abstract, more economical. So, there might have been a figure or a building in the center of the original postcard image, but in the top corner, in the background there was a tree. I’ll paint that tree. Often the postcards have strange chromatic glitches or shifts, e.g., sometimes the sky might be an intense pink, or a lake appears to be a vivid green, and I’ll accentuate or amplify that color in my paintings, so that the resulting images takes on an even more dream-like or hypnotic state.

John Maclean (b. Perth, Scotland 1972) lives and works in London, England. He studied at Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland (1990-1994) and the Royal College of Art (1994-1996). He was a founding member of the groups The Beta Band (1996-2005) and The Aliens (2005-2010). Between 1998 and 2021 he has directed numerous music videos for The Beta Band, The Aliens and Django Django. His short film ‘Man On A Motorcycle’ was released in 2009, and his widely celebrated first feature film ‘Slow West’ was released in 2015. He has exhibited his art only occasionally in group shows between 1994 and 2004. This is his first solo exhibition.

For further information: info@whitecolumns.org