Printmaking began for Norman Maclean when renowned printmaker Penny Ormerod of Wellington introduced Gisborne artists to the techniques of zinc plate etching in 1976 when she came to live in this district. Subsequently, friendship with Carole Shepheard of Auckland - now Kawhia - and Lynn Taylor of Dunedin, has provided me with much guidance and inspiration. Zinc plate etching and solar prints have remained Norman's favoured fields and formed the backbone of numerous exhibitions including several one- man shows.
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| Sourcing the image: from trave diary to illustration and thus to the plate. |
A self-taught artist Norman was eventually a graduate of the Otago School of Art but his work both before and after my time as a student, was strongly shaped by what he had produced as an artist working in oils and acrylics. With little recourse to pure abstraction, the figurative has predominated in Norman's work. A life-long obsession with mythology, legend, mysticism and symbolism has shaped much of his style. Carl Jung's theories of archetypes and the collective unconscious have also provided him with much imagery as have travels made in and around the Mediterranean, the Aegean and near East.
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| Painting and printing often go hand in hand. |
As a teacher of Art and Art History in secondary schools, he moved into teaching Classical Studies: the civilisations of ancient Greece and Rome have naturally been reflected in much of Norman Maclean's painting as well as printmaking. You will look in vain for the ubiquitous landforms and icons of contemporary New Zealand art in what he produces. As this country pursues its visual identity in these, very often to excellent effect, his reaction is that we are well served artistically with those emblems of our nationhood. His deepening preoccupation is with the jettisoning of our European heritage he is compelled to turn back in time, however unfashionably, since he strongly feels we are neglecting those primal influences that have shaped us psychologically and spiritually.
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| Preparatory work in Norman's studio: local printmakers' studio is where the plates are processed. |
As a secular nation, increasingly wedded to the here and now, the material and our immediate surroundings, he tends to disregard so much that molded the cultures of our northern hemisphere ancestors. We are only minimally separated from them in time and he has become convinced that much of our disquiet; our increasing failure to cope with rapid change and social dislocation, lies in the rejection, consciously or otherwise, of those things that sustained our forebears. Much of his painting and mixed media work revolves around symbols and images of the past.
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| Prints mounted and framed ready for exhibition. |
Norman has little time for the prevailing notion that an artist must "explore" matters since all art is exploration and as has been observed: "All the arts are brothers, each one is a light to the others". He can only be true to myself, allowing those things that simmer at a subconscious level to emerge through both paint-brush and burin. Fashionable art holds no appeal for him: He is interested only in style which at its best remains timeless.
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| Painting and printmaking styles are continually varied. |
