By Loudon Temple
WHEN you are married to one of the most successful touring and recording performers Scotland has ever produced, life can at times get a little hectic.

But Jennifer MacLean and husband Dougie these days have it so finely tuned they’re known as the most organised couple in the business.

In normal times, Australian-born Jennifer is fully switched on and well able to cope with the daily challenges of juggling her time as a vital cog in the well-established music machine.

There’s all the usual stuff to be contended with and more … contracts for gigs to be sifted through, emails to answer about usage of songs and melodies owned by their publishing company, an online store to administer and music festivals and other events to organise.

But whenever she is able to set some time aside, she turns to art.

Her range of watercolours, prints and cards is popular with fans. Her artwork has featured on album sleeves, tour posters, stage sets and other publicity associated with Dougie’s work for many years.

“We’ve always used every opportunity,” she says, “to link in my work with Dougie’s. They go hand-in-hand.”

Since Covid came along to seriously curtail the couple’s usual activities and give her a greater chance to develop her own creativity further, she’s been working overtime and enjoying every moment.

In recent weeks, she has been working on a much bigger scale than of late – a woven hanging that includes beach driftwood, hand-spun wool and naturally-dyed wool and string, completed with intricate knotting effects for additional texture and visual impact.

Well used to touring whenever her husband hits the road, and taking care of most of the business associated with every aspect of their Butterstone Management & Events operation, when the current health scare stopped so much of that in its tracks, she grabbed the opportunity to spend more time in her Perthshire home, garden and art studio.

Both the work and component parts she’s been using are quite monumental in scale. It took a good few days just to set up the unusual off-loom weaving.

Once that had been completed, she just sat and studied what were in effect the bare bones of the piece, contemplating her many options.

Over the past forty years, due to her husband’s popularity around the world, she has developed many business as well as artistic skills.

“A typical week can be very varied,” she says, “I look after the management of all of the business – the online store, Dougie’s management, our publishing and our own production studio, organise all of the bookings, and alongside all of that, I’ve always done my own watercolour paintings, some spinning, dyeing and weaving. 

“I’m a businesswoman of necessity rather than ‘calling’… but my real passion is creating artwork….and appreciating good music of course!”

The giant piece that has been dominating life in recent weeks, simply called ‘my boat weaving’, sprang from some of the time the couple enjoy while staying at the property they own on the western side of the Isle of Lewis.

She prefers to make her own dyes from nature, sourcing everything from lichens, bark and nettles to flower heads and fruit.

“For this piece, I wanted to have different shades of blue to tie in with the fact that the main component of it will all be suspended from a large section of an old wooden boat that Dougie and a friend of ours called Fin found on the shore on the west coast of Lewis.

“It’s a big hulk of a thing - probably about nine feet long - and for this project, for the first time in many years I bought myself natural dye powder online because I really needed indigo.”

Jennifer has shown her watercolours and weavings in exhibitions both here and in other parts of the UK and in galleries as far afield as The Netherlands, Brazil and Australia.

Now, she hopes to convert part of the old village school and teacher’s house that has been their base for many years, into an ideal space for displaying her original creations.

She explained: “It would be my dream to ultimately have the work on private view by appointment here ‘at home’ in Butterstone at some stage in the future. It would be the prefect space and atmosphere for that.”

The weekly online concerts the couple have been staging since March 2020 from that same ‘old school’ space have been hugely popular, with fans around the world able to enjoy a short weekly concert free-of-charge, and they often attract more than 12,000 people in a single week all eager to tune in, and a longer ticketed show once a month. 

They have also just staged Dougie MacLean - Live 75, the 75th lockdown online performance.

Asked how he rates her art, Dougie said: “Jenny has a really unique way of using watercolours in her painting, and weaving colour and texture into her organic wall designs. I’m her biggest fan!”