Audio Transcript
So my name’s Ian McLaren and I’ve been living and working in Moreton Bay for 30 years so I’ve had a long association with the local area. I guess I would describe myself as a, an illustrator, I do a lot of drawing so that’s really my main focus and I paint in oils. I do a lot of work on paper, so I keep visual diaries you know, most of the time, as a sort of a record of what I’m doing.
So the last two years we had an exhibition at Pine Rivers Art Gallery called Fresh Eyes. For that work I created a series of works on paper called Mosquito Island series. So the whole concept of that is that I live right on the mouth of the Caboolture River. So my view out the front of where I live is Mosquito Island. So sounds like a really, not inviting place, but I actually find it really inspirational because it’s something that I look at through my window every day. So it’s my muse, it’s you know, it’s what I see in everything, in the background of what I’m doing.
So when we had the lock down, I had all good intentions of going and doing grand works in the landscape and sort of painting in the mountains but what happened was we got locked down, so I had to sort of stay and just go “oh well, what am I going to do?” look around my house, and my yard and so that was the work that I created, from the buildings and the views and the things that were in my backyard.
Within the work there are a lot of emotions and I guess if it was a novel the work would be a psychological drama because it became almost a struggle to get through the year. So I guess the thing with the work is it’s got isolation because I was stuck at home; anxiety because you know, we didn’t know what was going on. So there’s a certain element in the work which I think it’s slightly gothic because it’s got that, ‘what’s going on? What are we going through here?’ I think if you look at the work it’s like a series of tiles and it’s basically a timeline. But when you randomly put the works together they sort of work off each other. So hopefully I can record the moment which is the last two years and people can you know, sort of scan the images and sort of maybe get a feeling of just what and where I was at the time, and how I was sort of responding to our recent times.