After surviving several near-death scares and channelling them into his art, John Bellany continues to find colour in his life and work By Barry Didcock- Sunday Herald
SIX WEEKS AGO, JOHN BELLANY travelled to Tain for an exhibition of his paintings. He never made it to the private view.
Instead he was rushed into Raigmore Hospital in Inverness where doctors told him he had pneumonia, an infection which had developed in Italy, where Bellany was recuperating from a cardiac problem connected to the heart attack he had in a Glasgow street in June 2005 on his way to an exhibition of his paintings at the Mitchell Library. “I was very seriously ill and I’ve only just recovered,” he tells me. “Well, not quite recovered but at least I can speak.” A week ago, he couldn’t even do that.
He can almost always draw and paint, however. The studio of his house near Cambridge would be enormous were it not for the canvases stacked 20 or 30 deep against the walls, and as he leans forward to take a sip of tea I notice a smudge of yellow on his wrist from this morning’s work. Bellany may be 66, but the flow of ideas is unstoppable, the thirst to paint still unquenchable. The only impediment is his health.
Behind me is a large canvas with a few square feet of space round it. It’s here, facing a wall and with windows on two sides, that Bellany paints, loading his brush with the yellows, blues and greens that have made his palette one of the most recognisable in Scottish art. A knuckled giant’s fist of dried oils stands sentinel, evidence of this industry.
Last summer, Bellany exhibited a series of paintings at the Lemon Street Gallery in Truro. It was his first showing in Cornwall, odd for an artist whose work is so imbued with the spirit of Celtic myth and who is so in thrall to the sea and to the men and boats who work it. As if to make up for lost time he returns to the gallery next month with a series of new views of Cornwall, Scotland, Italy (where he has a house – article here ) and China, where he exhibited at Beijing’s National Gallery of China in 2005.
Never afraid to confront death or mortality – often, in fact, compelled to do so – Bellany has once more found his eye drawn to maudlin subjects. In his hands, the decommissioning of a Cornish fishing boat becomes a sort of death motif.
“It was like cutting up a body in the mortuary,” he says of a scene he painted several times. “I was almost in tears thinking about the people who had sailed on that boat, the people who had drowned on that boat. It was such a huge, beautiful object and it was so sad seeing it getting chopped up.”
The most powerful painting in the new show is Homage To Garfagnana, in which Bellany hymns the way of life in a much-loved region of Italy and returns to another favoured subject, the sacred and the profane. The painting is a triptych whose central panel shows two men and a woman by a bonfire on which a devilish-looking yellow dog is being burned. In fact it’s a fox and the onlookers are Bellany and two Italian friends, Natalina and her husband Bruno. It’s a scene Bellany witnessed and, although the fox had been stealing the couple’s chickens, he was struck by the reverence with which they treated the dead animal. Flanking the central image is a woman in bustier and miniskirt, signifying modernity, and an archbishop standing over the body of a dead child.
Bellany’s stare is at its most unflinching when it is his own face in the mirror, his own life under the spotlight. His strong family ties with the east coast fishing communities of Port Seton and Eyemouth – “my roots” as he calls them – are a constant subject but so too is his inner turmoil. You can see it most clearly in the etching he made of his own distressed face following his liver transplant in 1988. Bearded, his long hair unkempt, he would look Christ-like were it not for the tube in his nose.
Bellany is at his most beguiling, however, when this turmoil is codified: in Allegory, for instance, a 1960s’ triptych showing a series of monstrous crucified haddock; in 1974’s Self-Portrait With Accordian, in which his head is bandaged like Van Gogh’s; in The Drinker, from 1982, painted when he was descending into the alcoholism that would result in liver failure two years later and make the subsequent transplant a life-saver.
These paintings are products of a life which has not been safe or easy. It began in Port Seton on June 18, 1942, at 18 Gosford Street, where Bellany was born into a family of boat-owning fishermen. His talent, however, was for drawing and painting rather than fishing. “It’s changed now but in those days painting was seen as a sort of eccentric hobby,” he laughs.
Nevertheless, in 1960 he became the first person from Port Seton to study at Edinburgh College of Art. The principal at the time was Sir William Gillies, the head of painting Sir Robin Philipson. Bellany learned from the best. He made good friends too, among them Alexander Moffat, later head of painting at Glasgow School of Art, and the poet Alan Bold.
In 1965 Bellany moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art. Although he owns a flat in Edinburgh’s New Town he has never returned to Scotland to live, although you could equally say that emotionally he never really left. Still, when Gillies and Philipson travelled south in the late 1960s to ask him to take up a teaching post in Edinburgh, he declined. He told them he wanted to “take on the world” with his art and couldn’t conceive of doing it from north of the Border in the company of the same people who had taught him.
By then his horizons had expanded too much. He had fallen under the spell of Goya after a trip to Madrid. He had discovered the films of Luis Bunuel and Ingmar Bergman and, in 1967, had encountered the work of Otto Dix on a cultural exchange trip to East Germany in the company of Moffat and Bold. He also visited Buchenwald concentration camp and wondered at the destruction wrought on Dresden by the RAF. Over 20 years after the end of the war, the city still resembled a bomb site. “It was unbelievable,” he says. “The whole of the centre of the city, the cathedral and everything, was all just rubble. There would still have been bodies under there.”
But as Bellany took on the world, the world took on a darker hue. As he tells it, the 1970s and early 1980s were gloomy decades. In 1961, at Edinburgh College of Art, he had met Helen Percy, a girl from Golspie. They married three years later and subsequently had three children, but by 1974 the marriage was over, due in part to his drinking. Helen stayed in the house with the children, Bellany lived in the studio nearby and saw the family at weekends.
AS always, the emotional upset found its way into his work. A 1970 painting, The Family, shows a couple joined at the neck by a padlock and chain. The woman cradles a baby as crows circle a stake on which a fish’s head has been impaled. The man, dressed in black like a pastor in a Bergman film, blows on a wooden flute. The image is hellish, the tune almost certainly a lament.
“As an artist you have to portray your emotions as they are, no matter how heavy. And if you can take them, other people who are looking at them are able to take them, as long as they are sincere and as long as there is integrity there,” he says. “I don’t think any camouflage is allowed in the way I work or you can spot it a mile away and it has to be destroyed.”
Bellany was teaching and lecturing in London at the time, first at Croydon College of Art and later at Goldsmiths. At Croydon he met the sculptress Juliet Lister, great-niece of Lord Lister. They married in 1979 but it was an ill-starred union. He was drinking more and more, she began to suffer increasingly from manic depression. Accordingly, Bellany’s paintings of her are bleak. In two studies from 1979 her face is half-hidden, only her eyes visible. In another, Self-Portrait With Juliet, she is almost a blank. She died in 1985, the same year as Bellany’s father.
“It really was a bad time all round in terms of luck and chance,” he says. “I had no idea that Juliet would get as ill as she became. It’s an incurable illness so there was nothing I could do about it. I could cherish her as much as I could but it made no difference. It was a very sad time. When she was OK it was marvellous but then she got the depression more and more frequently.”
In these bad years, Bellany’s work had become gestural and wild. “Colours and tones became darker and more brooding,” he says. “The paintings were much harsher, looking inwards. The content was much heavier as well, almost despairing.” He laughs blackly at the memory. “I need a drink of tea.” He leans forward and takes a sip, then sits back again.
“When I came out of that, after my transplant, I couldn’t believe it. My colours became as bright as the sun because I had been given a chance. It came from inside. It was always emotional. It changed with the psyche and it was a natural thing.”
By then he had remarried Helen, the mother of his children and – the word is apt given his love of boats – his anchor. You can’t talk about Bellany or even look at his paintings without knowing about Helen. She is a vital presence in his life and today, even in her 60s, a beautiful woman.
“Helen came along and just gathered up the pieces,” he says simply. “I think if it hadn’t been for Helen and the children I would have been dead, no question about it. It was a traumatic experience.”
Bellany’s transplant was a watershed. The first time he was allowed out of hospital after the operation he donned a tuxedo in celebration. (article here to celebrate 20 years after his successful transplant )As the 1990s dawned and his health improved, his palette became hotter. He turned increasingly to water-colour as a medium and he and Helen began to spend more and more time in Italy, eventually buying a home in Barga in 2000. Bellany loves the place for its people, its food and its climate, but most of all for its timelessness.
“You get the feeling with the people in the village we live in that it could be 1520 or it could be last Thursday,” he says. “OK it’s part of the 21st century, but the way they live their lives is exactly the same as it was 200 or 300 years ago.”
It’s the immutability of small communities like Barga, Port Seton and Eyemouth that Bellany loves, their ability to block out the din of the outside world and keep time by their own rhythm. His travels have also taught him that similarity unites people more than difference divides them.
“That has struck me in the profoundest possible way,” he says. “Of course the places are different – the skies, the mountains, the sunsets – but the people are incredibly similar. They try similar things.”
He throws his arm over my shoulder, pointing to a painting in the far corner of a room. It shows a woman in a fish market in China. “She isn’t any different inside herself,” he says. Chinese trawlers are still trawlers; Mexican fish markets are still fish markets. Elemental needs, and the people who meet them, change only slowly.
After an hour and a half of talking, Bellany is tiring visibly. He is also “desperate for a pee”, he says, a side-effect of his medication. I turn off my tape recorder. When he returns, however, he tells me there’s more that he wants to say. He sits down again and talks for another six minutes and three seconds.
He starts by thanking his wife and his children for the care they have shown him recently (article about his son Paul Bellany who is now filming John’s life here) , by which he means for much longer than just “recently”. He mentions his eight grandchildren too. “It gladdens my heart just to see their smiling faces. I love them all so much”. And, of course, he talks about his recent illness.
“I think when you hit a period like that where you think you’re going to die, you hit the depths and the heights of your emotional capabilities. That’s when you think your deepest thoughts and have your warmest feelings. And all I can say is thank goodness I am still alive because I have so many more paintings to paint.”
He stops soon after that, making a sideways cutting movement with his hand. “The epilogue!” he says and laughs, though whether for my benefit or his own, I can’t really say. Not a eulogy, then, but a note of optimism. I’m glad.