EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND – NOVEMBER 15: Hellen Bellany stands beside portraits at an exhibition by her husband John Bellany at the National Gallery on November 15, 2012 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The exhibition, the largest, most comprehensive exhibition of work by one of Scotland’s greatest living artists, will open at the Scottish National Gallery this week.
Marking his seventieth birthday, and celebrating his contribution to British painting, John Bellany: A Passion for Life will bring together around 75 paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints from all the key periods of the artist’s fifty-year career
This will be the first retrospective of this scale in almost three decades and will include many works that have rarely, if ever, been exhibited before. – source
Images of John Bellany’s work in Barga can be seen here
“I never thought in a million years I would make it to 70. It’s as big as a surprise to me as to everyone else. But I still feel inside like I am 25. It’s unbelievable, with all these health problems. It is a miracle and I am amazed. But I have hope and optimism and that keeps me on the right track.” – John Bellany
In his Edinburgh show John Bellany RA looks back on his life’s work, writes Emma Crichton-Miller
It is the big questions that preoccupy John Bellany RA. His large, colourful figurative paintings, with their surreal juxtapositions of objects and people, are fraught with metaphysical interrogations. A painting from 1986 summarises, in its title borrowed from Gauguin: Whence do we come, who are we, whither do we go? Now a major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh celebrates the 70th birthday of this artist whose work is deeply rooted in personal experience.
Bellany was born into a devoutly Calvinist fishing community on the coast near Edinburgh and enjoyed, as he reports, an idyllic childhood. His early paintings, with their bold colours, raw emotions and vigorous lines, reflect the physical harshness and moral drama of this environment.
A visit to Buchenwald in the late 1960s, however, darkened his imagination, triggering periods of despair and heavy drinking, exacerbated by the breakdown of his first marriage and the death of his second wife. His art reflected this inner turmoil, as seen in You’re 30 Today, John (1972). In 1988, a liver transplant saved his life, and he embarked on a set of frankly self-scrutinising drawings and watercolours, The Addenbrooke’s Hospital Series.
This second lease of life and the subsequent healing of his first marriage initiated a more optimistic phase, with his later paintings developing an allegorical richness of allusion. Now he is based part of the year in Tuscany, yet the softness of the warm south has not driven philosophy from his work. His sun-filled later paintings reflect a joy wrested from an intensely lived life.
John Bellany: A Passion for Life Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, 17 Nov−27 Jan, 2013