Haven

It was the scenes of his boyhood by the river Stour that shaped Constable's art. So, likewise, the fishing boats and the harbour of Port Seton on the Firth of Forth made John Bellany a painter; but, unlike Constable's memorable vision of the natural world, Bellany's landscape is an inner one. Its inhabitants are not players in some external, narrative drama. The drama is real enough, but it is inward. He has always been an intuitive painter and his art depends on suggestion and the evocation of mood informed by memory rather than on any deliberate construction of meaning. Its impact is the product of a poetry of association. These memories are first of all of his childhood and upbringing by the sea, ever present in his painting, but then, too, of adolescence and its associated sexual guilt that was later worked out in the troubled years of his earlier adulthood. Bellany was born into the fishing community of Port Seton on the Firth of Forth. There, life, and too often death too, were focused on the sea and, perhaps by a kind of projection of its mighty indifference to human fate, on a bleak religion of perpetual atonement, unforgiving as the sea itself. His father was first a fisherman and then a boat builder. Further down the coast his grand-parents lived in another fishing town, Eyemouth, a little harbour tucked in beneath the steep Berwickshire cliffs to the south of St Abb's Head. In these places it was not just that the young painter was surrounded by boats and the sea. Port Seton and Eyemouth were not yachting marinas. He was part of a community entirely shaped by the age-old relationship of fishermen to the sea. In a way it was archaic: hunters like our most distant ancestors, pitting their skill and courage against the sea's unpredictable power to hunt for fish in a timeless relationship between man and nature. The world of fishermen is a world of daily, casual courage in the face of death, of skill and knowledge learnt from experience and collective memory. It was surely his access to this collective memory in the close community of interrelated fishing families that gave such power to Bellany's sombre early work and that lives on here. To reflect this, at that time he drew directly on the classic imagery of Western art, but in it the blood-thirsty imagery of guilt, suffering and death that is the common currency of traditional Christian iconography is rendered through images of the world of fishing and of the fishermen among whom the artist as a child had been exposed to this same terrifying imagery from the pulpits of the Plymouth Brethren and the Church of Scotland. There too it was liberally illuminated by the awful glow of Hellfire in a way calculated to strike terror in any child's heart. he pictures here are still located in that world. Softened by time, it has now become a much quieter and more gentle place than it was then, but the sea is still a constant presence and almost half these pictures contain recognisable landmarks of the landscapes of the artist's childhood. The harbour of Port Seton itself appears directly in The Quay at Port Seton. The harbour at Eyemouth appears likewise in Eyemouth Sunset, Eyemouth Roadstead and Eyemouth Melancholy, but the features of its distinctive harbour appear in The Storm, in The Tempest and in several other pictures, too. The Bass Rock, a huge basalt monolith that stands at the entrance to the Firth of Forth and home to a vast colony of gannets, dominates Soliloquy. The Lomonds, East and West, two symmetrical, breast-shaped hills on the skyline of Fife across the water from Port Seton, stand suggestively on the horizon in By the Sea and are implied in the skyline of The Road. But even in the most direct of these paintings, this representation is oblique, the mood not simple and often infused with a kind of melancholy. In Eyemouth Sunset and The Quay at Port Seton, for instance, both apparently straightforward landscapes, the red and yellow clouds have far more to do with feeling than with meteorology. These paintings are emotionally charged like the landscapes of Munch's early work which these and other paintings here recall. But in Bellany's paintings the local and specific reference in the subject matter also reveals how this emotional charge is the product, not so much of romantic angst, as of actual remembered feeling. These landscapes are real places where things happened, but the pictures are projections of the mental landscapes where the feelings of the past live on undimmed rather than simple representations of these actual places. The fierce emotions in the artist's often nightmarish early pictures seem now to be recollected in relative tranquillity, but if they are less sinister than they once were, these pictures are still haunted. Ghosts walk through these landscapes. Over the last ten or twelve years, these apparitions have tended to be no longer so threatening. They seem to speak to us rather of acceptance than of the perpetual guilt induced by a religion where there was no middle ground between unyielding self-righteousness and eternal damnation where a sensitive young artist could find a haven, a place where he could bring his own boat safely to harbour. Here, however, the harbours that are so often the subject of these paintings do now seem peaceful, places where a storm tossed boat might indeed find shelter. Perhaps some accommodation has been reached between the conscious and unconscious minds, between a more tranquil present and all those troubled memories. In these pictures people still share their world and at times their very identity with strange creatures, apparently metamorphoses of the fish and birds and sea creatures of the Firth of Forth, but they do so without obvious conflict. Even in The Storm and The Tempest, the upheaval, though real enough, is not presently threatening as it would once have been. It is rather a difficult sea passage remembered than a present moment of imminent danger. Indeed the tone of all these paintings is now luminous, not dark or discordant as it once was, though it is not as sunny perhaps as some of his recent work has been. These storms and hauntings seem at one level to be autobiographical. Perhaps there are even identifiable individuals in several of the pictures. It might be his wife, Helen, on her own in The Long Wait, for instance, but who is the half obliterated figure in The Road? Is it the artist himself, at once both present and absent? One cannot really speculate who these or the other figures are who make up the dramatis personae, nor does one need to know, for in the end the drama is visual, transmuted from memory into autonomous images. To remind us of all the stories that these pictures do not tell directly, however, there are also quotations in them from the artist's sombre early works. Whence do we come? Who are we? Whither do we go? was the subtitle of one of his most powerful paintings of that time, The Obsession, and no doubt the question must still be asked. In the present version of this picture, a man and a woman and a third creature which is a kind of familiar spirit, stand in a boat beneath a towering stormy sky. This group is a reference to another early masterpiece, The Sea People of 1975. The original composition of The Obsession, itself, consists of five figures each isolated from the other in a stark image of alienation. Nominally identified as men gutting fish, a bloody heap of fish carcasses lies in front of them, but it, too, is a metaphor of alienation rather than a documentary detail. This figure group, or perhaps it is a similar group from another equally fierce earlier painting, Homage to John Knox, reappears here in Death and the Maiden as a motif of three figures in a distant boat: remote watchers, the silent Greek chorus of an enigmatic drama. There are watchers everywhere, ominous presences, and indeed there is one painting with that title, Ominous Presence, which is also another piece of self-quotation, both in the title and in the composition, which refers back to a painting called The Fishers from 1975. In the earlier paintings these ominous presences are again terrifying images of alienation. Now, however, in Whence do we come? Who are we? Whither do we go? the two characters seem prepared to ride out the storm just as in Ominous Presence they no longer seem threatened by the strange creatures that share their boat and so their lives. Perhaps, at last, no longer alien they have reached an accommodation, a basis for peaceful co-existence.

Duncan Macmillan, art critic and art historian, is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh and art critic of the Scottish financial paper, Business a.m. He has written extensively about Scottish art and artists, past and present. His main book, the standard work on the subject, Scottish Art 1460-1990 (Mainstream, Edinburgh) was recently republished in a new edition as Scottish Art 1460-2000.

Selected Bibliography

1942 Born in Port Seton, Scotland
1960-65 Edinburgh College of Art. Studied painting under Sir Robin Philipson
1965 68 Royal College of Art, London. Studied under Carel Weight and Peter de Francia
1967 Official cultural visit to East Germany with Alan Bold and Alexander Moffat: visited Dresden, Halle,, Weimar,, East Berlin and the
Concentration Camp of Buchenwald
1968 Lecturer in Painting, Brighton College of Art
1969-73 Lecturer in Painting, Winchester College of Art . Visiting Lecturer at Royal College of Art, London and Goldsmiths College of Art, London
1978-84 Lecturer in Painting, Goldsmiths College of Art, London
1983 Artist in Residence, Victoria College of the Arts, Melbourne
1988 Elected Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge
1994 Awarded CBE by Her Majesty The Queen
1996 Awarded Honorary Doctorate, University of Edinburgh
1998 Honorary D Lit, Heriot Watt, University of Edinburgh
Honorary Senior Fellow, Royal College of Art, London

Awards, commissions and prizes

1962 Andrew Grant Scholarship; travelled to Paris
1965 Postgraduate Travelling Scholarship;
travelled to Holland and Belgium
Commissioned by Ministry of Agriculture
and Fisheries to paint murals for Chesser House,
Edinburgh
1965 Burston Award at Royal College of Art, London
1980 John Moores Prize Winner
1981 Major Arts Council Award
1985 Athena International Art Award
(joint first-prize winner)
1987 Wollaston Award, Royal Academy, London
1991 Commissioned to paint Lord Renfrew and Sir Roy Caine
by the National Portrait Gallery, London
1992 British Council visit to Central Europe; Prague;
Vienna; Budapest
1993 Korn/Ferry Picture of the Year, Royal Academy, London

Public collections

Aberdeen Art Gallery
Arts Council of Great Britain
Belfast Polytechnic
British Council
British Museum, London
Chesser House, Edinburgh
Contemporary Art Society
Dundee Central Museum and Art Gallery
Edinburgh Corporation
Ferens Art Gallery, Hull
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Glasgow Art Galleries and Museums
Government Art Collection
Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow
J. F. Kennedy Library, Boston
Kassa Kasser Museum, New York
Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery
Leeds City Art Gallery
Leicester Museum and Art Gallery
Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Middlesbrough Art Gallery
Museum of Boca Raton, Florida
Museum of London
Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Art, Gdansk
National Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin
National Gallery of Poland, Warsaw
National Library of Congress, Washington
National Portrait Gallery, London
New York Public Library
Perth Museum and Art Gallery
Royal College of Art, London
Scottish Arts Council
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh
Sheffield City Art Gallery
Southampton City Art Gallery
Swindon Museum and Art Gallery
Tate Gallery, London
University of Western Australia, Perth
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
Wolverhampton Municipal Art Gallery and Museum
Zuider Zee Museum, Holland
Solo exhibitions
1965
Dromidaris Gallery, Holland
1968
Edinburgh College of Art
1969
Winchester School of Art
1970
Drian Gallery, London
Hendricks Gallery, Dublin
1971
New 57 Gallery, Edinburgh
Printmakers Workshop, Edinburgh
Drian Gallery, London
1972
Royal College of Art, London
1973
Triad Arts Centre, Bishop's Stortford
Edinburgh City Arts Centre
Drian Gallery, London
1974
Drian Gallery, London
1975
Aberdeen City Art Gallery
1977
Acme Gallery, London
1978
Glasgow Print Studio Gallery
Scottish Arts Council Gallery, Edinburgh
Printmakers Workshop Gallery, Edinburgh
Crawford Arts Centre Gallery, St. Andrews
1979
Glasgow Print Studio Gallery
Third Eye Centre, Glasgow
Southampton City Art Gallery
Newcastle Polytechnic Art Gallery
Glasgow Print Studio Gallery
1980
Acme Gallery, London
Moira Kelly Fine Art, London
1981
Goldsmiths College Gallery, London
1982
Rosa Esman Gallery, New York
1983
Paintings 1971-1982, touring exhibition to:
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield
Third Eye Centre, Glasgow
Rochdale Art Gallery, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon Tyne
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr
Rosa Esman Gallery, New York
Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne
1984
Dusseldorf Gallery, Perth
Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney
Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney
Mercury Gallery, Edinburgh
Rosa Esman Gallery, New York
1986
National Portrait Gallery, London
Fischer Fine Art, London
Galerie Krikhaar, Amsterdam
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh,
and Serpentine Gallery, London (retrospective)
Inaugural Exhibition for opening of Henry Moore Gallery,
Royal College of Art, London
1987
Peacock Gallery, Aberdeen
Nigel Greenwood Gallery, London
"The Old Man and the Sea": Paintings and Prints',
Compass Gallery, Glasgow
Greenhill Galleries, Perth
Roslyn Oxley Gallery, Sydney
Butler Gallery, Kilkenny Castle, Ireland
Hendricks Gallery, Dublin
Maclaurin Art Gallery, Ayr
Third Eye Centre, Glasgow
'Recent Acquisitions', National Portrait Gallery, London
1988
Ruth Siegel Gallery, New York
'Bellany as Printmaker 1965-85',
Third Eye Centre, Glasgow
Printmakers Workshop Gallery, Edinburgh
Aberdeen Art Gallery
Beaux Arts, Bath
1988-89
Hamburger Kunsthalle and Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund (retrospective)
1989
"The Renaissance of John Bellany",
Watercolours painted in Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge'
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Fischer Fine Art, London
1989
'John Bellany "A Renaissance"
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Aberdeen Art Gallery
Beaux Arts, Bath
1990
Raab Gallery, Berlin
Ruth Siegel Gallery, New York
Compass Gallery, Glasgow
1991
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Fischer Fine Art, London
1992
'John Bellany "A Long Night's Journey into Day Paintings
1972-92", Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
1992
Flowers East Gallery, London
1993
Flowers East Gallery, London
Berkeley Square Gallery, London
1994
Beaux Arts, Bath
1995
Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New York
Edinburgh Festival Exhibition
Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh
Strathclyde University Gallery, Glasgow
1996
Peacock Gallery, Aberdeen
MacGeary Gallery, Brussels
Galeria Kin, Mexico
1997
'John Bellany "A toast to Mexico", Beaux Arts, London
1998
'John Bellany "a Scottish odyssey", Beaux Arts, London
1998-99
Elaine Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida
2000
Beaux Arts, London
Solomon Gallery, Dublin
Selected group exhibitions
1963
Edinburgh Festival Exhibition, hung on railings, Castle Terrace
(with Alexander Moffat)
1967
'John Moores Exhibition 6', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
1968
London Group
1971
'Scottish Realism', (Scottish Arts Council Touring Exhibition)
'10 Scottish Printmakers', Sussex University
1972
'British Figurative Art', Nova London Gallery, Copen hagen
1973
'Fanfare for Europe', Drian Gallery, London
'Figures in the Landscape', (Arts Council Touring Exhibition)
'London Group', Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
1974
'A Choice Selection', Scottish Arts Council Galiery, Edinburgh
'British Painting'74', Hayward Gallery, London
'British Art '74', Germany (British Council Touring Exhibition)
'John Moores Exhibition 9', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
1976
'John Moores Exhibition 10', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
1977
'25 Years of British Painting', Royal Academy, London
'Expressionism and Scottish Painting', (Scottish Arts Council
touring exhibition)
'London Group', Royal College of Art, London
'Scottish Painting', Edinburgh College of Art
'British Painting', Nottingham Castle
1979
'Scottish Artists', Amos Anderson Gallery, Helsinki
'Tate '79', Tate Gallery, London
'Independent Irish Artists Exhibition', Municipal
Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin (with Bacon, Crozier and Freud representing Britain)
'British Painting', Oxford University
'The British Art Show' Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield,
(and touring exhibition)
1980
'John Moores Exhibition 12', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
(Prize Winner)
'British Art 1940-1980: The Arts Council
Collection', Hayward Gallery, London
1981
National Portrait Gallery, London
'13 British Artists', (British Council exhibition touring) Germany
'Art and the Sea', (touring exhibition)
lan Birksted Gallery, London
1982
'The Subjective Eye', (touring exhibition)
'John Moores Exhibition 13', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
'Contemporary Choice', Serpentine Gallery, London
'Inner Worlds', (Arts Council touring exhibition)
'Drawing Towards Prints', Printmakers' Workshop, Edinburgh
1983
Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin
'Self-Portraits', (Scottish Arts Council touring exhibition)
1984
'Scottish Expressionism', Warwick Arts Trust, London
'The Hard-Won Image', Tate Gallery, London
'The British Art Show', (touring exhibition)
1985
'Athena International Awards', Mall Galleries London
(joint first-prize)
'British Painting', Manchester City Art Galleries;
Fine Art Society, Edinburgh
1986
'Man and Animals', (Arts Council exhibition), Nottingham Castle
'Celtic Vision', touring exhibition opened in Madrid
1987
'Scottish Painting 1954-87', 369 Gallery, Edinburgh:
Warwick Arts Trust, London
Awarded George Walliston Prize for best work in
Royal Academy, London
Represented Britain: 'Ljubljana Print Biennale',
Yugoslavia, '2nd Triennale of European
Engraving', Grada, Italy
'The Self Portrait', selected by Edward Lucie-Smith
and Sean Kelly, Artsite Gallery, Bath;
Fischer Fine Art, London
'The Scottish Bestiary'(portfolio of prints touring
exhibition), The Banqueting House, London
1988
'British Romantic Painting', touring exhibition opened in Madrid
'The Royal College of Art Print Portfolio Exhibition',
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
1989
'El Greco', National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (guest artist)
'Eros in Albion' (House of Massaccio) Italy,
(British Council Exhibition)
'British Figurative Painting', selected by Norbert Lynton
'Every Picture Tells a Story', (British Council touring exhibition),
Hong Kong; Singapore; Africa
'Scottish Paintings since 1900', Scottish National Gallery of
Modern Art, Edinburgh; Barbican Art Gallery, London
1990
'Glasgow's Great British Art Show', McLellan Galleries, Glasgow
'The Compass Contribution', Tramway, Glasgow
'8 Scottish Printmakers', (British Council touring exhibition),
Singapore; Glasgow
'Turning the Century; The New Scottish Painting'
(touring show), Raab Gallery, London; Milan, Berlin; USA
'Bellany, Howson, McFadyen', Auchencloss Gallery, New York
'Scotland Creates', McLellan Galleries, Glasgow
1992
'New British Art', Denmark, (British Council Exhibition)
1993
'Scottish Painting', Flowers East, London
'Contemporary Trends in British Art', Hayward Gallery, London
'John Moores Exhibition 18', Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
1994
'The Bigger Picture', McLellan Galleries, Glasgow
1995
'Contemporary British Artists',
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
1996
'Contemporary European Figurative Painting',
Walter Gropius Gallery, Berlin
National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
'Contemporary Scottish Painting', Edinburgh City Art Centre
'An American Passion' - The Susan Kasen Summer
and Robert D. Summer collection of contemporary
British Painting, McLellan Galleries, Glasgow;
Royal College of Art, London
Inaugural exhibition of the collection, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
'A Scottish Renaissance', Hong Kong Gallery
(British Council Exhibition)
1997
'Contemporary Scottish Portraits',
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh
'British Art from the Arts Council Collection',
Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
1998
'Religious Images', National Gallery of New South
Wales, Sydney
Edinburgh Festival Group, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
25 Years of the Kilkenny Castle Guest Artists Project, Kilkenny
1999
Rehang with Max Beckmann and Stanley Spencer,
Tate Gallery, London
'Scottish Artists', Solomon Gallery, Dublin
'Scottish Art Now', Festival Exhibition, Edinburgh City Art Centre