It’s a disgrace that this painter is being shut out
McLean shunned for Ontario honour
George McLean may be Canada’s greatest living painter of wild creatures and places. Certainly he is one of a very small pantheon of masters in this field worldwide.
Now 77, after more than a half-century of painstaking work that has garnered him international acclaim, McLean is at the height of his powers — producing canvasses stunning for their insight, technical reach and ambition.
Yet for two years running, this most authentic of Canadian artists has been excluded from the list of new entrants to the Order of Ontario — despite a movement from a group of his admirers to see him receive the award, which is long overdue. This is, simply, a disgrace. His subject matter is the wilderness of Ontario itself, placing him in a direct line of succession from past masters such as Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. If McLean isn’t worthy of Ontario’s highest honour, no one is.
Disclosure: I know of McLean’s nomination because I am among those who have supported it. I met him at a Tom Thomson Art Gallery event in 2010, coinciding with the launch of his international show, The Living Landscape, which concluded at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyo., in 2012. I soon became an admirer of his work. In late 2014, at the request of one of McLean’s patrons, I helped assemble biographical material that was sent to the Order of Ontario’s advisory council — apparently, to no avail.
As a result, I know this: McLean grew up poor, in a tough, working-class family in Toronto’s Parkdale district, in circumstances that could hardly have been less likely to produce a major international artist.
His stories of early childhood are stories of struggle — literal struggle, not figurative — and chronic family upheaval. McLean believes his passion for studying, drawing and painting animals, which he came to very early, saved his life.
His talent drew the attention of a keen-eyed primary school principal who referred him to Northern Secondary School in Toronto, which had a fine arts program, from which McLean graduated in 1958. In 1960 he sold his first painting, for $50. That same year he began spending every spare moment at Toronto’s Riverdale Zoo, studying the animals, painting from life, honing his craft.
By 1961, aged 22, having become a mentee of the great American animal painter Bob Kuhn, McLean was painting for a living.
In 1963 he married his high school sweetheart, Helen Willis. In 1969 they bought their 100-acre farm and stone house just south of the village of Bognor, in Grey County, where they live to this day. And through all the intervening years McLean has walked, observed, studied, drawn and painted the woodlands at his doorstep. He works every day.
McLean’s professional life has been, quite literally, devoted to Ontario — to the depiction and chronicling of the province’s woodlands and their natural life. No other artist, it’s fair to say, has dedicated as much time to Ontario, specifically the rolling highlands two hours’ drive north of Toronto, in any medium.
His treatment of forest light is astonishing. The settings in which his animals exist are not pretty backdrops, but complete natural ecosystems, rendered in hyper-realistic, naturalistically accurate detail.
What most distinguishes McLean’s work, though, is its recurring theme of predator and prey. He captures the critical instant in an animal’s life when it is about to become predator — or prey. He portrays animals honestly, as they go about the utilitarian, savage business of staying alive. The paintings are starkly beautiful; their underlying theme is truthful, implacable and harsh.
How is it conceivable, given such a singular career and impressive body of work, that McLean would not pass muster for the Order of Ontario, which added 26 honorees last week? Hmm.
McLean is, of course, an animal painter. He’d have more currency, perhaps, if he sprinkled chicken blood on a crucifix, howling incoherently, and filmed himself in the act. McLean is a commercially successful artist, who has never received an art grant, and thus is beholden to no board or bureaucrat. McLean is a curmudgeon, who dislikes fancy parties and whose battles to preserve Grey County wilderness are the stuff of local legend. And, McLean is a rural Ontarian, with a rural Ontario sensibility.
Among the lawyers, doctors and activists who dominate this year’s list of inductees — as they dominate all such lists, it seems — he’d run decidedly against the grain.
The McGuinty-Wynne Liberals, consummate downtowners, have never bothered to try to understand Ontario beyond Toronto. Small wonder the province’s highest honour reflects just such a bias.
HIS STORIES OF EARLY CHILDHOOD ARE STORIES OF STRUGGLE — LITERAL STRUGGLE.