About

My name is Brandon McLean. I was born in the West Palm Beach, FL area in 1981. I was actually born in the same hospital as my father, Thomas McLean, who was born in 1954. My paternal grandparents married in 1950, and raised five children in the humid mosquito laced suburb of Lantana.

My mom moved to the area from Columbus, OH around 1964 when she was nine years old. She was also one of five children. She met my dad at Lake Worth High School in the early 1970's.

While I was growing up family was always around. Most of my aunts, uncles, & cousins lived just minutes away. Gatherings were frequent. Holidays, birthdays, & backyard bbq's.

My paternal Grandparents bought a house/trailer in Big Pine Key, FL in January of 1982. I made my first trip to the Florida Keys when I was barely six months old. To say it's been a place that's had a huge effect on my life is an understatement. How could it not be?

 The colors of these photos in the south Florida summer sun of 1974.


I've always been interested in the past.  Every time I visited my Grandparents I would sit down with the boxes of old photographs I pulled down from shelves in the back of the closet. Seeing my parents when they were nineteen & twenty. My dad with a handsaw on top of my mom's head,  while she stood there laughing in her pink bikini. Picking through the never ending number of fishing photographs. So many faces, grinning with their catch held up. I had met some of them, some had died when I was just a kid, but they were there before.

Documenting, and collecting have great importance to me. Since I started making art in 2000, I've always had journals, notebooks, envelopes full of scraps.

Change, experience, the passage of time freaks me out.  The past is a weird one.