First published in the Catalogue

ANDREA McLEAN
A Wheel of the Year

~~~

The Wheel of the Year

I see the Wheel of the Year as a slice through a great cheese or the wide gleaming base of a felled oak with patterns of inhabitation and growth, the seasons inscribed. Fresh and light, tarnished and rotten, it has been exposed by the chainsaw or knife as a circle of hidden history. Might it lie flat on the ground? It is raised to face us like the moon's full face. We notice there is a flower in the moon - with four plump petals, pale blue, pale mauve sprays like water or winds. There has been life there in this giant flower of our human making. It smells of tiny writing, owl pellets, fur and femur. Andrea is never sentimental: her black and white owls are innocent, questioning, murderous, like and unlike us. She is very good at painting the weird otherness of creation, the small mammals on the edge of medieval manuscript illumination.... the salty blue of the water dulled with the shafts of rain striking, a fox with a crossbow aimed at a soft belly or with a halter round its neck being strung up in the vestry. Away from London's scientific and falling apart centre, in Gloucester exile and homecoming, she is remaking the broken centre from the edges with black fences, flower baskets and teenage radios.

The wheel has six regions, a darker more mysterious, less explored outer one, with stains of the past and premonitions of the future. There are the four petals - a loose mandala - each one represents the possibilities of all four, an evenness, and then there is the central circle where the four passes through the realm of slug and snail to become a three - Mother, Daughter and Holy Spirit.

What are these marks of awkwardness, the veinings and threads? Sometimes there is a fine disregard for the under pattern - like the passages of an ant over a grey seventies television screen in a rubbish dump.

What's on tonight at the wheel? A record of a person painting, a person who for a time did little else but paint, who has lived for painting, and been saved by painting. She has her languages. Detail of the cathedral is woven finely in there into her impersonal design. Here is a new kind of guide to the building, a way of looking without gravity, with colours and sensuous impressions replacing dates, architectural terms and the names of famous men.

Is it not a hopeful painting? I see form and clarity emerging from the face of the waters and a relaxation about significance. These accumulated noticed things, small storms and blurred harshnesses. Andrea is not forcing anything upon us. She is not making a point. The world was moving she was right there with it AND SHE WAS. She looks down at the world, perceives the pattern which comforts, and she has made it her life's work to show and share and shape this pattern. There are coincidences, things do fit together, they can make sense. And Beauty exists. Now as advertising - following the work of visual artists - becomes uglier, more eager to blaspheme and obsessed with painful sensation, the older beauty that advertising once distorted into a false idyll (a family picnic among oak trees) is now returned again to the territory of painters and poets who can celebrate without greed the rolling mysteries of spring, summer, autumn and winter.

Christopher Twigg July 2002

View the Exhibition The Flower of All Cities