Page 5 - Art First: Simon Lewty and Will Maclean: Charting a Decade II
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BURIED TREASURES
‘I was sitting in the sand and I picked up some bones and I recognized them
as toe bones because of my anatomy lessons in the art school.’ is casual reference
to a subject long axed from most art education courses is one of the more startling
moments in Will Maclean’s Artists’ Lives recording, which he made with interviewer
Jenny Simmons during 2005. At the time of discovering he was holding somebody’s
toe bones in his hand, Maclean was on the Isle of Lewis. Rather than being the
remains of a recent drowning as he at first feared, the skeleton then uncovered
proved to be a Viking Princess, nestling alongside her burial treasures, and was
later transferred to a new resting place in the National Museum of Scotland.
e Princess was lucky in her finder. Having become acquainted with Maclean
through listening to his recording, I find it hard to imagine anybody more
respectful of the Scottish landscape, its history, its poetry and its people, or anyone
else who could combine this with such physical compe tence and practicality, the
latter honed in his training as a seafarer as much as at art school. Like his work,
it is as if Maclean has himself been formed from the land scape; the binary skills
of fisherman and artist nourishing one another as natural partners.
