John McClenaghen

What Makes John McClenaghen’s Work Unique

John’s practice is rooted in a deeply personal relationship with the Scottish landscape, one that stretches back through generations of his family. The grandson of a ploughman, nephew to both a shepherd and a grieve, he grew up moving between the contrasting worlds of town life and his relatives’ farms around Stirlingshire and the East Lothian coast. Those childhood experiences of crossing between environments heightened his perception of both, and that sharpened awareness remains central to the way he sees and paints landscape today.

These paintings are built from what John describes as inherited memories. His mother, aunts, and uncles spoke often of the farm they grew up on, and their richly woven descriptions created a place he would visit in his imagination: full of wildflowers, tall grasses, narrow lanes, and a farm road walked in all weathers. Over time, the places he remembers firsthand and the places he absorbed as stories have merged into one, forming what he calls a landscape of the imagination, a tapestry of fragmented, collected memories like an unfinished painting waiting to be completed.

This is visible in works like The Resting Field, where fallow land stretches open and unhurried, or David’s Loan, which evokes the quiet, purposeful lanes connecting farm to village. Reaching the Sea captures that characteristic moment in East Lothian where narrow dune fields give way to the coast, a threshold between land and water that has been an enduring theme throughout John’s career. In each painting, the fields are often left fallow and we find our own path through the land, sometimes toward a house in the distance.

Technically, John approaches landscape not as a static scene but as a living, changing entity. He works with colour from the outset, using an extensive range of implements and techniques to build constantly changing surfaces that harness the fluidity and unpredictability of paint. He returns repeatedly to the same locations, believing that he only truly sees a place properly as he draws or paints it. The result is work that draws parallels between the action of light and weather upon the land and the action of colour and mark upon the canvas, moving beyond mere representation toward something that reconstructs feeling itself.

"John’s paintings are landscapes of the imagination as much as landscapes of place. Built from inherited stories and firsthand observation, they create spaces where memory and the physical world become inseparable, inviting viewers to find their own path through terrain shaped by generations of connection to the Scottish land."