John McLean was born in Liverpool to Scottish parents and he grew up in the north-east of Scotland. He studied at St Andrews University from 1957 to 1962 and then from 1963 to 1966 attended the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. McLean went on to teach at various London art schools from 1966 and had his first solo exhibition in 1975 at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh. For a time, in the late 1980s, he lived in New York.
John McLean's work typically features bold shapes and rich colours. He often incorporated elements of collage into his paintings and drawings. The elements of colour, form and space are fundamental to John Mclean's abstract works. McLean regarded the abstract elements as being informed by external experience and therefore having an emotional dimension. It is the use of colour which first hits the senses but equally important is the composition and the way in which the pictorial elements relate to one another. The luminosity, rhythm and the intentionality of each mark highlight the strength of his compositions, which suggest light and space. These ideas remained constant throughout the artist's career from the formal precision of his early work to the spontaneous and painterly expression of later years.
John McLean's work is in numerous private, public and corporate collections worldwide. The public collections include the Tate in London, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, the Hunterian Collection at Glasgow University and the Yale Centre for British Art in the USA. John McLean won several awards including an Arts Council Major Award in 1980, The Lorne Award in 1993, Critics Award for the Edinburgh Festival in 1994 and a Bryan Robertson Trust Award in 2008. He was artist in residence at Edinburgh University from 1984-5.
In a career lasting over four decades John McLean brought an outstanding talent and intelligence to the quest of colour harmony and contrast in painting. John McLean has become recognised internationally as one of Britain's foremost abstract painters. The artist's career could be viewed as an exploration of abstraction but at the heart of all John McLean's pictures is a celebration of colour.