Hamish McLain (Liverpool)		© Olivia Moura
After graduating from the renowned Liverpool School of Art and Design in June 2005, the British artist, who was born in 1983, received the Norman Moores Fellowship in Drawing and Painting. In March 2006, he got the chance to present the work done during his fellowship in a solo exhibition in Liverpool. Hamish McLain currently works on the staff of a gallery for modern media. Statement Hamish My work is an expression of my thoughts and feelings to my surroundings and the situation I may be in at the time. It's abstract at it's core but is fuelled by what's going on around me. The drawings and paintings act in a similar way to music, evoking moods and atmospheres through an abstract language. My work explores a balance between a raw expression of emotion and a planned attempt to unravel meaning from these marks. In the same way a person will learn from the steps they take when travelling, I learn from the decisions I make when painting. I create a mark on a surface and then another one, and then see how they relate to each other and so on. The work is built up like this. In some ways the work is like a record of that journey, like a map or diagram of how it came into being. My work is the journey manifest in the final piece. The relationship between the different parts of my work is influenced by urban and natural landscapes. Pencil lines and brush marks interact across the surface of my work in a way that is similar to buildings and roads interacting across a hillside or in a city. For this project I am exploring the moods and feelings the determine why my work ends up looking the way it does. I'm interested in how the path my work takes in it's search for meaning, relates to the different journeys people take when moving from one place to another.