Now for something completely different. Today we bring you the exceptional story of a very unusual artist. You could say he is an arts equivalent of the proverbial shooting star – someone whose irrepressible energy and philosophy for life can be taken as a recipe for escape from these troubled times…
Meet Beau McClellan, singer-songwriter, sculptor, blacksmith, stage manager/ set-builder, art director, lighting designer and lead movie “baddie”.
How did a man on the right side of 50 even manage all those achievements – let alone to an undeniable level of excellence? (“And I haven’t even got started yet”, he laughs.)
This is a story in which Portugal and the Algarve play a leading role. One in which setbacks too provide opportunities – and one that should give everyone hope.
These days, Beau McClellan lives in a rural farmhouse on the outskirts of Loulé with his Cape Verdean wife Lúcia (“without whom there wouldn’t be a Beau McClellan”) and their little son, Skye.
It’s a far cry from the day he arrived in Portugal on a motorbike, his few possessions in life packed on the back. His “first love”, music, had come to a bend in the road (“I had lost my record deal”) and he just wanted to drown his sorrows by getting as far away from his native Scotland as possible.
“Some friends had a house they were trying to sell in Portugal. To be honest, if the house had been in Outer Mongolia I would have gone there. But it just happened to be Portugal…”
And so he started “building up a life” for himself in the sunny Algarve. It was the early 90s when everything was possible. Developments were springing up right, left and centre. Fascinated by fire and naturally artistic, Beau began working as a blacksmith – specialising in forged steel.
Within an extraordinarily short space of time, he had built up a successful business with partner Adam Varley specialising in large-scale sculptures and one-off pieces for grand houses.
“We used traditional methods to create contemporary designs”, he tells. “There was no one else doing this kind of work at the time, and there were all these top houses in places like Quinta do Lago being built, which needed big pieces to fill huge voids“.
Quinta do Lago became their playground – and at the same time Beau got involved with set building and stage designing for fashion photography and commercial movies being shot in the Algarve. He eventually became an art director in his own right for commercial films.
But it was the moment where a “very courageous client” in Quinta do Lago commissioned a massive chandelier that added turbo-thrust to the angel-dust spangled ascension of Beau McClellan.
“Light is something that fascinates me, but I knew nothing about lighting at the time.
“I decided to take a year out; close the blacksmith’s business, and get as much information on lighting as I possibly could”.
These days there’s even a funny video of his quest, showing a dapper McClellan, curly locks glistening with rain under an umbrella, scouting out international lighting fairs all over the world.
In Milan, he came upon the stand of cutting-edge lighting manufacturer Brumberg.
“It was a revelation. I had never seen LED lights before. I kind of set about destroying their stand as I looked at everything, touched everything, and someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked me what I wanted…”
To cut a long story short, McClellan left the fair with half a container load of Brumberg “junk” with which he then set about experimenting.
Six months later, he had made a LED chandelier. It was one of the first of its kind – and it started getting talked about…
Brumberg decided he “wasn’t just a nutter who destroyed stands”, and signed him up as a designer. With customary McClellan speed, he designed an exclusive range of LED chandeliers all ‘made in Portugal’ from a hand-picked team, “although the materials came from all over the world”.
Just as he was getting the range ready for a prestigious lighting fair in Dubai, Brumberg submitted McClellan’s designs for the industry’s Red Dot Design Competition.
There was no thought in Beau’s mind that he would win a coveted Red Dot. “I was an unknown in the game. There were 35.000 other applicants. To be honest, I didn’t even think about it”.
But as he was preparing to leave for Dubai, the call came through to tell him each of his designs had won a Red Dot. That effectively sent the whole collection into the design award stratosphere.
“Within two weeks we were on the front page of every magazine in Dubai. There were radio interviews, TV, the works. And we suddenly got jobs for everything you could possibly imagine!”
But even real-life fairytales have their moments of drama. Just as he’d met obstacles in the past, the economic downtown that hit Dubai bigtime in 2008 threw him a curved ball.
“We lost everything overnight” he recalls. “However there was one project we didn’t lose”…
It was for a massive chandelier in the atrium of a corporate building in Qatar. Beau’s 38.5 metre-long piece of interactive artwork, christened Reflective Flow, weighed in at a staggering 20.000 tonnes and featured over 200.000 LED bulbs. It catapulted him to design industry renown, and won a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the world’s largest chandelier.
Since then, life has just gone on being crazy. In between all the ducking and diving of the design world (“a world that moves very, very fast. You can be old news in six months…”), he managed to play a lead role in the Algarve’s first feature-length foreign-language movie “The Right Juice” – currently doing the rounds of international film markets – and “loved it”.
“I learnt so much and honestly would love the chance of more acting roles in the future”.
With two other partners, he is now busy developing his “Studio 43” in Loulé – “a kind of one-stop shop combining art and design”, and he is getting back to his art, finally. Restructuring, is what he calls it.
“I feel I need to get back to being an artist. To design what I feel – what comes from the heart.
“The Beau McClellan range grew, but it became too corporate. I need to be free of restraints now”.
Lighting, a return to sculpture, future acting roles. He is open to all of it.
“My father gave me a piece of advice once, and it is so true. He said: If you ever need anything done, ask someone who is busy.
“The important thing now, for all of us – for Portugal if you like – is to learn how to adapt. It is no longer a matter of the strongest surviving, it is about learning to adapt globally.
“People should start working together. We need to hold on to quality but be aware of the outside world.
“Portugal is still one of the nicest places to live in. I think it is the best place in the world for my son to have a childhood. As a country it is still renowned for its quality. The best bags, the best shoes are made here. Portugal needs to develop other markets, but stay traditionally Portuguese – hold on to its quality.”
Good advice from a rare type of artist – one that has learnt to adapt, time and time again, and come out on top.
Intriguingly, Beau is often asked to give talks to design students. It’s intriguing because he never actually finished his own studies. “I dropped out” he smiles.
But his lessons in how to succeed are simple:
“You have to be ready for change, and you have to allow yourself to be lead. Go with the flow”.
Was that the inspiration behind his gigantic Reflective Flow chandelier? Who knows – and who knows what lies in store for this unstoppable artist. As he said at the beginning of our interview, he “hasn’t even got started yet”…
Written by Natasha Donn
