Jean McLean

Jean McLean

Millinocket, Maine

Jean is a life long resident of Millinocket, Maine. She has found inspiration for her work in the woods, mountains and coast native state. Jean is a self taught artist and has been painting professionally for 35 years. She travels extensively throughout Maine and the Northeast with camera in hand in search of subject matter. Jean is an artist first but nature photography is her second love. She paints in pastels, acrylics and watercolors. She is best known for her seascapes, lighthouses, wildflowers and paintings of Maine’s highest mountain, Mt. Katahdin.

Jean paints Maine in its entire splendor, from its rocky coast to its vast forests and mountains. She strives for realism with a flair for looseness and imagination. Jean says “I don’t have to see the ocean to paint it, I can smell the sea and I feel it within me when I’m in my studio either at home or at the lake. I paint what I feel and I believe that real art comes from within and I put my feelings into my work.”

The love of photography came from a need to find material to paint. Maine has 88 lighthouses if you include the river lights and Jean has personally visited 76 of them. It was a challenge to visit all the 76 since you can only drive to 9. Jean spends a lot of time at Baxter State Park taking photos of moose, deer and wild flowers. Jean’s work has found its way to South Africa, China, Jordan, Australia, Canada, England, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Hawaii, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan and the Philippines. Closer to home her corporate clients include L. L. Bean, MBNA, and The Governors Restaurant and her works are hanging in the State Office Building in Augusta, Maine and in the House of Parliament in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The author Stephen King used one of Jean’s photographs of Mt. Katahdin to produce a mural for the Bangor International Airport. The State of Maine Tourism Bureau used Jean’s Mt. Katahdin photograph on the cover of “Maine Invites You” and circulated it throughout Europe to attract tourist to Maine.

Over the past 30 years Jean has had numerous one-woman art shows throughout Maine. More recently she had a showing of her work in Dover Foxcroft with the Maine Highland Artisan Guild and she is scheduled for another show in July of 2005. Other shows are being planned to exhibit Jean’s newest works.

Jean has received many awards for her art work over the years. The three that she is most proud of are the Grand Prize at the Bangor State Fair for a seascape; 1st prize by Vincent Hartgen of the University of Maine Art Department and Best in the Show by the general public for “Wild Lupine” and 3rd place among 200 artists at the South Portland Art Show for her seascape “Coast of Maine”.

Jean owns and operates Memories of Maine Gallery in Millinocket, Maine. Her works are on display at gift shops throughout Maine and at the Northport Gallery in Northport, Maine. Jean is a custom framer with a specialty in conservation framing. She has developed a unique line of specialty mats that enhance both her art and her photography. In the summer Jean and her husband, Dan Corcoran, live at their lake home at Deep Cove on Ambajejus Lake where she paints in her studio in the full view of Mt. Katahdin in all of its moods and glory.