The more you surround light with dark, the brighter it shines

Donna McLean's painting, powerful and introspective, draws you into a particular world, a world full of contradiction and paradox. A world of light and darkness; of space and claustrophobia; of speed and of stillness. The spectrum of her characteristic palette is richly dark: Ivory black, Vandyke brown, and Paynes grey. And yet her paintings are about light, since, as she points out, the more you surround light with dark, the brighter it shines.
Where are these paintings set? One vaguely recognizes the locations - Notting Hill Tube Station, for instance - but, like all great artists, she takes the familiar, the everyday and then transcends it. She creates her own noirish world of threatening shadows, where space - the space between buildings, within buildings - has no end. She chooses to focus on the places through which one unthinkingly passes, on the way to a different destination: alleyways, foyers, escalators, subways...
Take, for example, a particular favourite of mine: the practically deserted underground station, with its dark tracks rushing to an even darker tunnel in the centre of the painting. This picture exemplifies all that I find exciting in McLean's work. Everything - the lighter platform shrinking into the distance, the barrel roof held up by diminishing arches - plays to the power of the single point perspective, and the eye rushes to the epicentre, the tiny, floodlit figure standing at the end of the platform. The tableau is dynamic, kinetic - and yet eerily still. It is her inspired manipulation of scale which makes this, like all her pictures, so arresting. The station is exaggeratedly cavernous; the figure, in contrast, is tiny, frail and vulnerable. She takes the everyday banal experience and transforms it into a powerful vision, abstracting the humdrum reality and giving it a suspended, brown stillness.
As an architect I look at McLean's images of matter and space with envy. In a sense, we are working in the same domain. But the Arcadian poem is always more beautiful than the landscape which inspires it. Her art can intensify, pinpoint and concentrate her dreamlike spaces in ways which outstrip the finite reality of the buildings I can design and build.
She is a painter whose work echoes Rembrandt, Vermeer, De Chirico and Balthas - all painters who in their different ways celebrate light and shadow, space and silence, the same forces which give form to McLean's magnificent paintings. But, unlike her forerunners, she fearlessly concentrates on the container, not the contained; on emptiness and infinity, not objects. She creates something at once harmonious and inevitable, vulnerable and ethereal. Her painting has been informed by her own life, difficult and sometimes painful: and this is what gives her work its potency, its own unique emotional charge. She has been able to capture her experiences and transform them into these powerful and beautiful paintings. She is a serious painter; she is an exceptional painter.

Richard Rogers, 2000

Selected Bibliography

Born in Lancashire in 1963, Donna studied at the City and Guilds London Art School from 1982 - 1986. Her paintings have been exhibited in the BP National Portrait Competition, National Portrait Gallery and in 1991 she received the Llewellyn Alexander award for the Discerning Eye competition. She has held two Solo shows in London as well as several Group shows. Donna's first exhibition with Beaux Arts was in 1994 her second will be in November 2000.