ALLISON McCLAREN - September

Allison McClaren

Spring

WINDOWSPACE – September 2019

Sexual imagery is rampant in the natural world, particularly among flora in spring. Colour, shape and texture excite the spirits and fire the artist – think Van Gogh and sunflowers, Monet and waterlilies,  O’Keefe and calla lilies, Warhol’s flat gaudy ‘flowers’, more locally Celia Rosser’s ferociously fine banksias and Tim McGuire’s luscious tulips, peonies and fruits – the list could go on, for a long time, and the names of each artist-flower partner conjure an image almost instantly.

Locally there is an artist similarly ‘fired’, behind her quaint shopfront (once a billard hall and …) Allison McClaren cultivates a garden that meanders and weaves, perfumes, shapes and colours jostle, trees and vines tangle and wander around the fragrant path between house and hideaway studios.

McClaren had had no acquaintance with the work of Georgia O’Keefe when a random viewer observed that there was an affinity between their work.  Allison McClaren missed out on art training but she has been a practicing artist since a child – fearless – untroubled by a doubt of ability that constrains so many and hinders creative joy – McClaren remembers always being at one with her companionable imagination and its visual effusions. This writer is reminded of Patrick White’s Hurtle Duffield in The Vivisector (1970), who likewise as a child used to draw wherever he found a sympathetic surface. McClaren recalls drawing with chalk on the family fences: ‘I used to do that all the time. Constantly.’ At school she would draw in the margins of her exercise books – images appeared rather than words.  Surprisingly this ‘manuscript style’ infuriated the nuns.

‘My mother had pictures of thatched English cottages amidst beautiful gardens’, and this idyllic world attracted McClaren:  ‘the colours of nature make me feel happy, make you feel good.’ Among artist exemplars McClaren was naturally attracted to Monet. At home she created little tableau that would lead over time to her ‘felfs’ – little people she made without pattern or example to populate her world.

If anyone actively encouraged her creative tendencies it was her father, who bought her oil paints and gave her scraps of masonite he had primed for her use.  She took one of her works to school and asked that it be submitted to the Colac Art  Show – the nuns deemed the painting so capable they refused to submit it on the grounds it had been done by someone else. McClaren refused to be daunted by their distrust.

There was a time when rubber moulds and plaster were one of the craft  ‘trends’ – McClaren made armies of madonnas and decorated them, each uniquely – they were popular! Doilies from her mother’s linen cupboard also held her attention – some had been left unfinished and McClaren bundled a few off to school and sat amid dangling threads, making up stitches to give a semblance of capability. Fellow students hovered and she made up stories to go with the invented stitches. She was likewise fascinated by Asian artefacts and developed her own ‘Chinese writing’ which she was called upon to demonstrate in class – fellow students were fascinated and asked her to translate their name into Chinese which she obligingly did in ways no Chinese speaker would recognize. Fired by the derring-do of Enid Blyton’s the Famous Five she was a child constantly on the look out for ‘clues’. In her father’s paint shed she determined to become a gypsy and painted herself brown – painful paint removal cured that tendency.

Over the years McClaren has explored numerous creative avenues, pioneering the ‘let’s see what I can do with this’ approach. This spring WINDOWSPACE gathers together a collection of her flower studies to celebrate the season and plant her firmly in Beeac’s centre.