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| John Bellany |
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John Bellany: Endless Ecstasies In these dark days of mass migration and voluntary (or involuntary) rootlessness, the work of John Bellany has something very precious to say to us. For the imagery of his paintings is steeped in what he has known intimately all his life, and that continuity of lived history and tradition has never been lost, as he continues to this day to visit the scenes of his youth. He comes from an incredibly close-knit fishing community on the east coast of Scotland, on the Firth of Forth, and he began his career as a painter with memorable paintings of the very people he grew up with. He has remained true to this subject, though broadening it to include a wider allegorical span, and he continues to celebrate a way of life utterly familiar to him that is now sadly disappearing. It is this truth to self and inheritance which accounts for much of the power of his imagery. John Bellany's male grandparents and father were fishermen or boatbuilders, and fishing was ingrained in the family as a way of life. He himself worked in the school holidays gutting fish and smoking finnan haddock. Although he recalls his early years in Port Seaton and nearby Eyemouth (where his mother's parents lived) as idyllic, there was a constant awareness from childhood of the ever-present threat of death. So many fisherfolk never returned from their trips, and the Great Fishing Disaster of 1881, when 129 fishermen from Eyemouth lost their lives, was still fresh in living memory. To combat the fear of extinction, the community was both deeply religious and deeply superstitious. (There were 13 churches in Port Seton for a population of 2,000.) A strict hell-fire Calvinist upbringing, with church three times on Sundays, left ineradicable burdens of guilt and anxiety on the young Bellany. Not surprising that his work should subsequently embrace so whole-heartedly the sacred and profane, and be haunted by omens of good and evil. From the start, Bellany was hugely ambitious, with an unshakeable belief in his own ability, and a desire to change the world for the better. His vision was epic, heroic, and he was inescapably drawn to the grand statement. Firmly anchored in the North European realist tradition, owing much to Rembrandt and Bosch, Van Gogh and Ensor and Munch, Bellany carved out his own doomy allegorical imagery, stiff with the certainty of death and the possibility of redemption. His strength of purpose matched his urge to universality, and his essentially romantic and expressionistic spirit countered the intensity of probable damnation. It has been his great achievement over more than 40 years of painting, to have won through to a degree of serenity unknown in his earlier work. The red-eyed couple in the poignant tondo Lost Souls (1967), are like furtive rag-pickers atop a scrapheap surprised by the Grim Reaper, accompanied by their arching spitting terrified cat. As Bellany comments now with compassion, 'there's a lot of lost souls about'. It was in 1967 that he visited Buchenwald, and was deeply moved by the experience. His close friend Sandy Moffat recalled: 'Hell obsessed him after Buchenwald'. The dour early subjects became blacker. The anonymity of London, whence Bellany had moved to study at the Royal College of Art, seemed like a desert of lost souls after the loving community and camaraderie of East Lothian. Hogmanay, a painting from 1968, brings despair into the home, with a miserable and poverty-stricken Bellany depicted smoking a seasonal cigar (a gift from a well-wisher) in company with a death's head and a parrot. Is a sea voyage (the last, long voyage?) due? Or are the gulls coming in from the sea to scavenge on the rubbish heaps of the city? The painting of these two stiff-shouldered and awkward figures is framed within the picture in a complex structure of superimposed quadrilaterals which seems to imprison them. Perdu, from the same year, pursues the theme of imprisonment, framing two isolated individuals in institutional singlets against a joyless sky, as in a cell. Half-a-dozen gulls wheel across the bleak empyrean like waiting vultures. Around 1970, Bellany made a deliberate stylistic move away from using hardboard as his painting support and took to canvas instead. The fine handling and glazes of the early work gave way to a broader expressionist technique, more suited to the greater give of canvas. Some of the concentrated power of the first work may have been sacrificed, but Bellany gained an openness and speed of attack which has stood him in good stead ever since. An exception to the hardboard/canvas exchange is The Puffin Fable, a large painting dated to 1974, which Bellany chose to paint on board. A gull and a puffin, like sentinel figures, stand guard (or in watchful competition for food) over the ripped carcass of a large fish, against a lemon-green sky. The image seems to summon up some ghastly state of siege, in which neither party is prepared to make the first move. The clarity of the drawing once again has an uncompromising bleakness to it which chills the human spirit. There's not much encouragement here. In startling contrast is Where the bee sucks there suck I. It dates from 1985, when Bellany was already seriously ill with the liver failure that was almost to kill him, but also from the time when he had re-discovered his love for his first wife, Helen, and was reunited with her. It is a small and humorous painting, depicting a serene long-nosed beauty with an exquisite profile. She wears the most extraordinary flowering feathery hat like a dahlia, with a large bee buried in the midst of it. (We see only her head and neck above a wall; the suggestion is that below she is naked.) The painting's ground is a beautiful modulated blue, soft as plumage. It is optimistic and life-affirming: a remarkable statement for a sick man to make. From later in the 1980s, after his successful liver transplant operation in 1988, comes Vesuvius (1989). This is an altogether less innocent image, and can even seem intimidating. The woman, with her breasts on show like a goddess, wears a gull head-dress, its cruel beak open to gulp, shown against a wild landscape. This is woman in more knowing mood, elemental as nature. The Kiss of Life (1990), has been called Bellany's most resolved statement about his miraculous survival. A fish skeleton issues from the mouth of the gannet-shrouded woman and broaches the man's lips. (This seems reminiscent of the gull's habit of regurgitating food to nourish its young.) He is serpent-capped. They sit afloat in life's frail barque, in a turbulent sea of waterspouts under clotted cloud. It's all very sturm und drang. Other props include a Catherine wheel, the Ace of Clubs and a rocketing lighthouse. Nothing is simple in this universe. From the same year dates another version of Lost Souls. The couple who appeared in the 1967 image are older now, more worn by the world, and the tip they stand in is more colourful in its effluent and detritus. The man appears to vomit up a fish, yet he clasps it eagerly to his body, as if frightened of letting it go. The woman makes a half-hearted effort to hide her nakedness. The scene is somehow more perplexing and sordid than the earlier version, though it provides the artist with the opportunity for many a passage of bravura brushwork. The moon in a racing fervid sky looks like a golden apple ripe for the picking - the apple of fortune that this pair have already plucked and chewed to the core. Two smaller works represent the early 1990s - a powerful spiky charcoal drawing of Medea, electric in its lines, a good example of Bellany's great gifts as a draughtsman which have always underpinned his achievements as a painter - and Fish Gutter from 1992. This small oil depicts a slant-eyed bride of the sea (see her veil), with wind-roughened flesh and snouty breasts. Perhaps not the sort to tangle with on a dark night, yet who might just as easily possess a sterling character to offset her lickerish appearance. Three paintings from 1994 show the trend of Bellany's work in the last decade. The Virgin and Sage presents a girl in her finery on a metal-framed bed surrounded by tatterdemalion totems of dubious authority. The imagery has become a lot less specific now, less obviously descriptive. Animals are neither fish, flesh nor fowl, but some curious hybrid unique to Bellany's imagination. His symbols have become ever more complex, and through his fluid painterly shorthand, deliberately more ambiguous. Cockenzie Lass (the name of the boat, visible at the bottom of the painting) pictures a family group which could be baleful, even malevolent, or simply toughened by a hard hand-to-mouth existence. A strange animal-headed beast lurks below the striped presence of the matriarch. There are lyrical touches: in the background, there's a rather beautiful skeletal boat, to the extreme right edge, a lovely salmon pink section of wall with a blue window. Enjoy these elements, and write your own story. Interior Thoughts, also 1994, is also distinguished by passages of pure painting - for instance, that sectioned off by the black line at bottom right. Bellany excels at alla prima painting - direct, spontaneous brushing-in of colour. Here, in the blacks and fiery oranges, his palette recalls that of the celebrated Scots Colourists such as Peploe and Cadell. But it is a distant echo. Look instead at the bold outline of the mirror like a bodice, the two inchoate figures in the background to the left, possibly male and female, melting like wax in the sun, losing heads and limbs and becoming increasingly anonymous. And look to the girl who is having these strange thoughts. She is the most insubstantial figure in the painting, only sketched in, outlined, for her dreams (or nightmares) are what make up the real substance of the image. One of the most recent paintings in this group is Chinese Girl with Harp (2003). This is a relatively new subject for Bellany, based on a trip to China, though it was perhaps prefigured by his 1989 London Underground poster of Chinatown. The excitement at a new subject is palpable in Bellany's response - the brushy expressionist background, the looseness of handling and the suggestion of seething humanity in a carnival-draped street behind the girl. With her yellow mask-like features, she slightly resembles one of Chagall's dreamers. Her preoccupation is offset by the rich patterning of the interior in which she sits - and Bellany's evident enjoyment of the textures and designs of the hanging lettered banners which articulate the picture space. There is a remarkable overall quality to this painting - an activity in the paint - which suggests a new direction to the artist's development. With his restlessness and energy, it would indeed be surprising if he rested long on his laurels. Bellany is understandably reticent about his iconography, and has no intention of explaining or decoding his references or meanings. Instead, his aim is to present the viewer with an image replete with potential narratives, thus allowing different people access to his paintings on different levels, through different stories that speak directly or indirectly to them. Symbolism, after all, does not have to be clearly understood to be effective. Bellany makes the imagery more or less specific (depending on the formal requirements of a composition), and then encourages our response, opening the way to a narrative through the sensual delights of shape and colour. But what that narrative actually is has to be determined by the individual looking at the painting. In this way, in a very real sense the viewer completes the painting by the act of looking, and communication takes place. Although the primary meaning of ecstasy remains 'an overwhelming feeling of joy or rapture', we also speak of an ecstasy of pain or doubt or fear, referring to the secondary, psychological, meaning of the word - 'an emotional or religious frenzy or trance-like state'. In both senses, the word is deeply appropriate to the work of John Bellany, even more so in that the phrase 'endless ecstasies' (with which I have titled this essay) comes from the last line of his great friend Alan Bold's poem 'The Voyage of John Bellany: A Triptych'. I borrow it here in salutation to both painter and poet, and in recognition of what Alan Davie has referred to as Bellany's 'Nordic mystical power'. Long may it find expression. Andrew Lambirth London March 2004
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Selected Bibliography 1942 Born in
Port Seton, Scotland Awards, commissions and prizes 1962 Andrew Grant
Scholarship; travelled to Paris Public collections Aberdeen Art
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