Will Maclean
(born 1941)

Maclean was born in Inverness, Scotland, and studied at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen. He came from a fishing family, and following a scholarship to the British School of Art in Rome, he worked for a while as a fisherman. He’s represented in many public and private collections in Britain and abroad and is a member of the Royal Scottish Academy. He lives near Dundee, Scotland, where he has taught at the College of Art since 1981. The suite of etchings A Night of Islands has been exhibited at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

The suite was begun in 1989. Each of the ten images was conceived in response to a particular Gaelic poem or text chosen by the artist. The texts range from traditional tales to contemporary poems. Each print is composed of two major elements: the central etched image; and the border area, with is also etched. Several of these border areas were made by feeding objects such as seaweed, netting, and leaves through an etching press. Because the artist wanted the border and central image to form a single, unified, composition, he layered a variety of forms, colors, and textures over the whole print, using between three and five separate etching plates for each image. Much of the brilliant result was accomplished by trial and error.

The prints do not follow a particular sequence, rather they follow the order in which the artist worked on them.