There are many names for the type of art practiced by Richard McLean: Photo Realism, Post-Pop, Super Realism are some of them. The paintings look like photographs. Even when viewed from close range, their surfaces are so smooth that it is difficult to believe they were done by hand.

McLean's large paintings take him from two to five months of painstakingly skillful labor to complete. Like most of the other photo realists, he works from photographs, either his own or ones he has found elsewhere. Taking innumerable slides, he com-poses his pictures by cropping undesired elements and introducing bits and pieces from other sources, finally choosing the one composition that can be best transferred to the large scale and the intense focus of the painted canvas. The result is made into a transparency and projected onto the canvas, where McLean makes a tracing of the image in graphite. During the painting he is guided by a color print of the photograph. As McLean says, it sounds simple but it is not.

Despite an almost chilling objectivity, Super Realism has retained it's popularity amongst the many and varied contemporary schools of art. McLean is unique among its practitioners in that instead of depicting such inanimate objects as store fronts, trucks, food and gleaming surfaces he turns to non-urban subjects, like the horse and horse-show life. Born in Hoquiam, Wash., and raised in rural Idaho, he did "a fair amount of farm work" in his youth, he says, rode, went to country rodeos and owned a few horses. Searching for an identity in his paintings he turned back to that experience. He was spurred on by a discovery he made in San Francisco magazine distributing office.

"They handled various horse magazines, and in poring through back issues it dawned on me that there was a gold mine of material available in print. I was already interested in a centralized, frontal, focused image. If I doubted the concept in any way, those pictures convinced me," McLean says.

At times there is a cutting edge to the people in his paintings. He admits to viewing the eastern tradition in horses as elitist and finds a quality of charming hokum in "western finery, country music and eatin' beans around the campfire" a reaching out for an ersatz culture that perhaps never really existed in the West. But he denies that he is making "some acid or ironic comment on an aspect of American life," a charge that has been made with some justice against other photo realists. "My interests are aesthetic and intellectual; they are centered around the problems of painting."

Many of those problems have to do with the traditional view of the horse. "We tend to see the horse as action, passion, rippling muscles," McLean says, "the storm and stress we associate with dynamic energy and purity." He has challenged this traditional view by picturing the horse in a static pose, taking a subject that was "admittedly sentimental and putting it through the crucible of my painting powers to temper and harden it, to give it some kind of intellectual toughness, to make it read as a painting, as hard art. And yet the subject is romantic."

Excerpt from: Phyllis Linn, Classic: Magazine About Horses and Sports, 1976
Artist Statement:
My work is, among other things, about order, equilibrium, tranquility and innocence. It is also about the largely undervalued pleasure and spiritual instruction one takes from the sheer look of things.

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