Valerie McLean is an Artist, Educator, Mentor and Art Writer. She is Course Leader for both the Friday all day yearlong Painting and Mentoring Courses at Leith School of Art and taught Studio Practice and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art. She is a professional member of both Visual Arts Scotland and the Society of Scottish Artists. Her work was short listed for the Scottish Landscape Awards in 2025 and in March 2026 her work was longlisted for the Jackson's Art Prize.
Her paintings focus on the underlying emotional and psychological resonances that emerge in our interactions with the natural world. Working from life, memory, imagination, drawings and photographs they probe the visual and conceptual relationships which emerge in the juxtaposition of opposing pictorial tropes and methods of paint application. Drawing references from the dream like and the everyday she explores how the materials of paint and visual imagery can create worlds where opposing elements, such as order and chaos, abstraction and figuration, dwell together. She says 'my challenge is to make coherent thought provoking paintings rooted in a 'felt sense' of being in the world, often oscillating between the melancholy and the hopeful'.
In both her large and small scale works spontaneous and abstract elements arise from an improvisational use of materials, colour, mark, and shape alongside more ‘realistically’ rendered forms. Each work takes its own course, welcoming the unforeseen and unpredictable, while drawing on the felt, remembered and observed experiences of spending significant periods of time exploring the natural landscape near her home, on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and further afield.