John Bellany
Is it a rash presumption on my part to dare to sing the praises of a Scottish artist? As an ex-Californian, my only claim to Scottishness is that my father was Gorbals-born, Gorbals-fled, and that I’ve been an Edimbourgeois and a patriotic Portobellino for over four decades. My trepidation arises from Thom Cross’s blast (13 November) against non-Scots poking their noses into Scottish culture.
I plead extenuating circumstances: genuine admiration for a painter whose Scottishness comes from more than his fingertips. Right now in the Scottish National Gallery, RSA building, there is an exhibiton called ‘John Bellany: a Passion for Life’ which runs until 27 January. I’ve seen it twice (this is an unsolicited testimonial).
‘A Passion for Life’ becomes painfully clear, when one learns and sees that Bellany (born 1942) would have expired from liver failure due to heavy drinking if his liver transplant in 1988 at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, had gone awry. The aftermath is illustrated in the artist’s amazingly well-executed drawings of himself, immediately following the operation, as a bed-ridden, hospital patient. Most striking of all, however, is his painting
‘Prometheus’ (1988), the god who brought down the sacred fire, the teacher of the arts, whose punishment was to be chained to a rock while his liver was consumed daily by an eagle. ‘Prometheus’ is a self-portrait of Bellany, outstretched, naked, flat on his back, lying on a creel, his liver double circled in black.
Fish inhabit Bellany’s mythic and symbolic imagination. Duncan Macmillan can be cited once again. Speaking of Bellany in his ‘Scottish Art in the Twentieth Century’, he says ‘the experience of fishermen and the sea…was something personal, for the sea was in his family background, but it was also a poetic link with the primeval…’. Moreover, one must not forget the strong influence of his childhood exposure to Scottish Calvinism. This is perceptible in the reminders of life and death in his paintings, as well as in the recurring allusions to the Crucifixion. His visit to Buchenwald, and symbolic painting of Nazi victims in prisoners’ garb, exhibit a Calvinist sense of original sin. But other figures in his paintings cross their arms across their breasts, St. Andrew’s Cross, Saltire-fashion.
There is, I believe, another Scottish tradition which Bellany exemplifies. It is to combine local rootedness with a cosmopolitan
outlook. He knows who he is and where he comes from. He knows, too, what is out there beyond his ain folk. Well-aware of the European old masters and modern masters, he has learned from what he saw. Nonetheless, what he took from them, he made his own. Through grants and awards he taught, travelled and painted in Europe, Asia, South America. He has seen the world; and the world has seen him, and his art.
The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art owns a good number of the Bellanys on display. Yet as many, probably more of his paintings, are labelled ‘collection of the artist’. These are bound to be snapped up by private collectors, either here or in the international art marketplace, as soon as the artist can be persuaded to part with them. My proposal is that the residents of Scotland acquire them, through purchase, bequest (in the far future one hopes), or through semi-permanent loan, and house them in a specially built (or refurbished) gallery located, not in Edinburgh or Glasgow, but in one of the small fishing ports of the artist’s memory. Eyemouth would be an excellent candidate (the Scottish Tourist Board, please take note). ‘The John Bellany Gallery’ would be a fitting tribute to one of Scotland’s finest living artists. Count me in as a modest subscriber.
Gary Dickson is formerly a reader in history and is an honorary fellow at the school of history, classics and archaeology, University of Edinburgh
Our linoleum oligarchs (the Nairn family) had donated the land and the linen and cloth manufacturers (John Blyth) helped pay for the art gallery and museum and indeed purchased paintings for the gallery back in the 1920s and difficult 30s. (Incidentally John Blyth is the maternal grandfather of the ubiquitous Michael Portillo.)
A very special pleasure in the art gallery was the quite extra-ordinary collection of Scottish colourists and Glasgow Boys on permanent display. In particular, Kirkcaldy had one of the best collections of Samuel J Peploe and from my teenage years I became a fan of this quite remarkable artist, neglected as unfashionable for a while but now celebrated in a quite splendid exhibition at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art (please note).
Along with the exuberance of John Duncan Fergusson and Francis Campbell Caddell as well as the iconic William McTaggart (all of whom were permanent features in the Kirkcaldy gallery) Peploe’s sheer joy in his skilful use of a colour-filled pallet lit up with a rare ebullience what was a dour wee toon. Though Paris was central to Peploe’s influence his Iona paintings with that subtle, soft, west-coast light are my very special favourites.
But Edinburgh is really more than fur coats this winter with another wonderful exhibition of Scottish painting – our galleries have had an impressive season – with John Bellany’s superb retrospective, ‘A Passion for Life’, his first major exhibition in Scotland since the late 1980s.
Bellany frames the imagery of his hurt with awesome potency yet with such an easy expertise in his expressive realism that I simply stood (and sat) in absolute awe of this exceptional exhibition so well mounted at the Scottish National Gallery.
Filled with the native imagery of his east-coast hame, its fisher folk with so many boats, one instinctively reaches for the biblical reference to leaving aside the nets to become fishers of men. There is a deep spirituality in his work that is profoundly moving, bringing to mind Highland psalms sung in that moving plaintive style of the Gael.
The range and depth of Bellany’s work is astonishing in this exhibition with work from his student days in Edinburgh to very recent meditations on death. Yet through it all (paradoxically) is the genuine joy of making marks; delivering art from his heartland with the sea as his muse. He sees his life in art through the prism of the sea and the life (and death) it brings (Melville and Conrad come to mind). Even in his American and Italian journeys he consistently finds his (difficult) contemplation making marks with his Scottish shaman’s vision expressed with revealing honesty through his art.
I urge the SR community to visit both exhibitions (Peploe and then Bellany) and discover the sense of a remarkable Scottish heritage of painting and passion – a line of continuity of colour and feeling expressed with such genuine talent and sincerity that it shames so much of what passes for current Scottish art.
Thom Cross is a writer and playwright
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