Born in 1968, Andrea lives in Ledbury, Herefordshire. She trained at Falmouth School of Art and the Slade, after which she held a scholarship at the British School at Rome. She works in a variety of media, including oil painting and etching. She has worked in ecclesiastical settings, including a year as artist-in-residence at Gloucester Cathedral, and her ‘Mappa Mundi’ painting is in the British Library Collection, on the third floor outside the Map Room.
Andrea is a Faculty tutor at the Royal Drawing School.

Andrea McLean grew up in the Forest of Dean, a world of earth colours and charcoal smoke drift, a landscape with which she felt at one. Home life, with an abundance of books, and school instilled a love for stories. Her mother introduced her early to Blake, “Blake made me into an artist”, and a childhood of drawing was followed, at 16, by art school at Falmouth and then the Slade.

From the start, art was a way of thinking about life, a portal allowing her to find meaning and structure. A deep interest in mapping developed: human-shaped and imagined landscapes, patchworks of land and water, ancient and modern settlements across time and space. Unsurprisingly, ‘cosmos’ is a word that’s long been close to her.

Now at a turning-point in her art, where space is no longer about an arrangement within a circle or on a surface, her work is becoming less map-like: “My focus now is the threshold place between different spaces which I’m seeing in the canvas”. Each day is full. Inner vision is what she’s trying to show.