STEVE MACLALLAN

Steve MacLallan was born in Paisley in 1957 as a latecomer. (in contrast to his ten years earlier born brother Iain Alexander (called „Hoodie“) MacLallan whose big problem in life was always beeing too early.

The family background was not too happy: mother spent her time reading the bible and beating her husband and her children. The father was a heavy drinking taylor producing shirts with paisley pattern and high collars which weren’t too popular at this time. He was a few years ahaed of fashion. A thing that should happen to everything the older brother Iain MacLallan would do in his life later.

Not very much is known of the early years of Steve besides the fact he researched about the life of his brother who left the family at the age of fourteen to start an education as a cook in Scotland (strange idea in a country that was culinary spoken only famous for things like porridge or haggis) to get away from beeing beaten four or five times a day by his mother. The children were predominantly beaten during daytime until their father came home from work. In the evenings mother started beating her husband. Which made absolutely no sense because he was normaly rat-arsed at that time.

Steve was luckier because his mother was weak after the late given birth. Noone understood how it could come to this anyway and the main thing he had to stand was the biblereading of his mother. No beats.

So he started to watch the world from the corner he lived in. And the world in his age consisted more or less of his brother. This is maybe an explanation for the fact he was so interested in the life of his brother.

Steve felt he was a conceptional artist since the age of five. Not very much is left from
the early phase of his work. During his life he spent a lot of time in researching what happened to his brother. Steve didn’t start painting before the age of 60. And a lot of the artwork was influenced by what he found out about his brother.

He spent quite a time travelling following the footprints of his brother. In the end he stranded in northern Germany where he lives now in the wilderness of the river Elbe.

Not a native speaker he works most with german language. The reason fort his is his strong believe in „The best precondition for awareness is ignorance.“ That’s why most of his paintings are in german. Another of his quotes on this: „Handle what you don’t know! Not understanding is a strong impulse for going ahead.“

Steve MacLallan spent a lot of time in research what had happened to his brother Iain Alexander „hoodie“ MacLallan who left the family at the age of 14 to start an education as a cook in Scotland (strange idea in a country that was culinary spoken only famous for things like porridge or haggis). It was mostly to get away from beeing beaten four or five times a day by his mother.

The cooking career of Iain ended abruptly because of his experiments to develop a vegan haggis which was not appreciated by his teacher.

(Vegan cousine wasn’t very popular at that time. The vegan society was originally founded by Elsi Shrigley and Donald Watson in England as union of milkfree vegetarians. In Scotland it was mostly seen as agression against scottish lifestyle because it was british. Complicating on top was the fact most vegans were antialcoholics. Not a very popular point of view in Scotland.

Nevertheless the concept of vegan food was launched years later with high investment in marketing by the food industry. It was the attempt to make inedible things sellable to consumers. Considering these facts you can see the experiments of Iain Alexander MacLallan as first revolutionary steps in his life. And as a proof for his problem of being too early with his ideas.)

As it often happens to revolutionary ideas the reaction of the world was not ideal. His teacher, a cook, 6,5 feet tall and 140 kilograms of weight, threw a pan after him to show his disappointment. And Iain decided to split.

He moved to Austria because he thought from all he had heard about it they had higher diplomatic standards than Scotland. And they had mountains too and spoke like the scottish english a german noone could understand. Seemed to be pretty familiar.

In Vienna he entered a hip advertising agency called „Schneller, Schlechter“ of the owners Jan Schneller & Franz Schlechter. In short time he made a career because he stayed in the agency most of the time (the rest of the employees stayed mostly in the Kaffeehaus like normal in Vienna). Iain had no flat, so he lived in the agency.

His second advantage was he could spell „artdirector“ correctly. No wonder he became creative director after 2 weeks.

One of his creative ideas nearly killed the agency and one of the bigger press products in Austria. He developed a coupon announcement with an applicated pork rind for the agency’s client Gilette. (which was in fact quite successful with a return rate of 76%. But the local Gilette office in Vienna didn’t know where to store all the pork rinds because of it’s spacial limitations. And these rinds started to stink dreadful immediately because it was summer.) So he had to leave again – not only the agency but the country and headed to northern Germany. He ended in a boarding school in Schleswig Holstein just to bring some distance between Vienna and him. He thought it could be good to have some more education. And he liked the food in the mensa which was terrible for normal human beeings.

What Steve found out about the further path of life of his brother will be published here in the future.

mail: steve@stevemaclallan.com

represented by:

Bernd Gerstacker

Wiesenweg 7

21368 Dahlem

Germany