Born in Inverness in 1941, Maclean was a midshipman on HMS Conway at Anglesey in Wales (Blue Funnel Line, 1957–59) before attending Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen (1961–65) and then the British School at Rome (1966) as part of a year on a Scottish Education Department Travelling Scholarship.
The resulting Ring-Net Project, a body of over 400 drawings, was exhibited at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, from where it toured, and in 1986 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, where it entered the permanent collection.
The British Library and Tate Artists Lives Sound Archive made a valuable recorded interview with him in 2005, the year he was awarded an MBE for services to Education and the Arts.
Recent sculptural commissions include the piece "Waterlines" (commissioned by the University of Aberdeen and installed in the square facing the new library there) and the Suileachan Project on the Isle of Lewis (winner of the Saltire Arts and Crafts in Architecture Award 2013), both collaborations with Marian Leven.
The critic and writer Duncan Macmillan writes in his introduction to the monograph on Maclean, Symbols of Survival: "Will Maclean is one of the outstanding artists of his generation in Scotland... his art is rooted in his knowledge of the highlands, the Highland people and their history and in his own early associations with sailors and the sea.