by Gail Scott, 2004 Standing before a 40 x 50” landscape photograph by Melville McLean makes me feel like a latter day disciple of Henry David Thoreau. McLean’s images, like Thoreau’s words, convey simultaneously the grandeur and the minutiae of nature. The timeless awesomeness of geological formations and the tiniest wildflower appear in equally crystalline focus. In the tradition of the American Hudson River School painters whose sublime landscapes were preceded by hundreds of drawings and studies of clouds, twigs, flowers, tree trunks, and other elements that eventually merged into their often enormous canvases, McLean has studied his subjects with patience and painstaking forethought. His craftsmanship is predicated on a deep, intellectual understanding of nature, but what happens in the photographed landscape is like a gift of first sight. We have been given the privilege and delight of discovering for ourselves the dewdrop on the maple leaf or the line of angled birch trunks leading the eye into shadowed forest depths, or the scarred and ancient strata of a granite rock. back