GABRIELLE B. MCLEAN
MEDIUM
Painting
ARTIST STATEMENT
“I love old, well-worn toys. I find a kind of vitality in their imperfection. Through color, composition, and texture, I paint sensory traces, both forgotten and remembered at the same time.”
ARTIST BIO
Gabrielle B. McLean has been drawing horses since she was five years old. It wasn’t until she was a teenager that she expanded her repertoire to include people and other animals. Yet despite the many hours she spent with a pencil in her hand, she never once imagined becoming an “artist” when she grew up.
Her art career began unexpectedly in 1991 while she was studying at university, where she would go on to earn a degree in Political Science. In her third year, she met a muralist who, after looking through her sketchbook, offered her a job despite the fact that Gabrielle did not know how to paint. He told her, “If you can draw, you can paint.”
After graduating in 1994, the same year the Northridge earthquake took both her apartment and her mural job, Gabrielle chose not to pursue graduate school. Instead, she started her own mural painting business. For a week, she sat at her mom’s dining room table with The Yellow Pages, calling local interior designers. Within three months she was overbooked, and she has been working with designers ever since.
It is through these collaborations, creating large-scale works for both private and commercial spaces and developing fluency across oil, acrylic, encaustic, and a wide range of other materials, that her distinct visual language began to emerge.
To date, Gabrielle has painted entire wings in children’s hospitals, designed and painted numerous nurseries and playrooms in celebrity homes, and built everything from a seven-foot-tall Santa’s mailbox to an oversized, wearable candy necklace. She is drawn to the novelty and challenge of each new project, as well as the opportunity to work with new people and materials. Yet over time, working alone in her studio revealed a longing for deeper human connection.
This awareness, combined with a deep exploration of the role of play in our lives, led Gabrielle to found Heartfelt Play Studio in 2015. It is a Costa Mesa–based creative space grounded in the belief that play is not a luxury, but an essential part of a well-lived life. Through process-oriented art-making, Heartfelt Play offers coaching, workshops, and collaborative experiences that invite people to reconnect with their creativity in a safe, non-judgmental environment. She has led community murals, team-building experiences, and intimate group sessions. This work became an essential extension of her practice.
The through-line between Heartfelt Play and her fine art was not intentional, yet it is anything but coincidental.
Gabrielle has long been drawn to the quiet pull of discarded things. Imperfect things. Past-perfect things. Perfection is fleeting and arbitrary, while imperfection carries a kind of enduring truth. Toys are only new until they are played with. Flowers are only perfect for a short time before their stems fray and their petals turn brown. Gabrielle finds vitality in what comes after. In the post-perfect. In the once-cherished. For her, these objects hold the power to rekindle a sense of aliveness, often through the simple act of noticing.
This interplay between rekindled play and overlooked objects forms the foundation of the Toy Series. Old toys, often boxed up and stored in the back of a closet, quietly dismissed as no longer relevant. Beloved, yet banished.
And yet boxes can be opened. Their contents revisited, appreciated, and valued as Portkeys to another time and place.
Gabrielle paints what she sees, but through the lens of memory and imbues it with feeling using color and texture. The subject determines the structure, even when it appears arbitrary or haphazard. This sensibility is central to her compositions. Subjects rarely remain contained within the frame, and her brushwork often extends beyond its edges, suggesting that what is visible is only a fragment of something larger.
Gabrielle is especially drawn to the structure of chaos, like a dumped-out pile of toy parts, because for her it represents potential, possibility, and the joy of creation through play.
Memory, for Gabrielle, is not only visual but sensory. It lives in texture, scent, and touch. The ridged surface of a Lincoln Log, the pitted texture of a jack, the faint smell of a red rubber ball. She brings this specificity to the series, allowing each piece to resonate on both a visual and emotional level.
Gabrielle currently divides her time between commissioned work for private clients and interior designers, her studio practice, and the continued evolution of Heartfelt Play.
The Toy Series marks Gabrielle’s first year at the Festival of Arts and represents a deeply personal body of work. Created from the inside out, it is rooted in memory, childhood, and play, and in the quiet conviction that what we have loved and forgotten can guide us back to who we were before we began shaping ourselves into who we thought we should be.
She is delighted to share it with you.
