john Bellany

John Bellany: An appreciation 

I discovered art late in life (my 50^th birthday.) I was given a set of a paints, brushes and canvases and significantly two paintings by the celebrated Caribbean artist Ras Akyem (Ramsey). His dynamic use of colour and dramatic content captured my attention and led me on. That summer I travelled from the Caribbean to attend a summer course at Edinburgh School of Art.   I was asked what training I had and explained that I had taken some classes at the Jamaica School of Art twenty –years before.  Painting in the studio (some life studies) gave me time to look out the window and use colour.

One of the tutors asked me if I knew the work of John Bellany. While saying no she took me to the library and there in Edinburgh I discovered John Bellany artist.  What a revelation, what a memorable experience, what a significant act of education that has shaped my vision now for almost twenty years. For leading me towards Bellamy I am so grateful to that tutor whose name I’m afraid I have lost.

But it was in the work of John Bellany that I found both succour and inspiration. His power of paint and passionate use of colour is so thrilling and moving. But his ebullient colour doesn’t reduce   his quite awesome expression of feeling.  His feeling is in each brush stroke with an invigorating emotional relationship with his paint.  He is the artist that understood the pain in painting. He is the antithesis of Matisse writing in Notes on Painting:

“What I dream of  is an art of  purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which could be for every mental worker, a soothing , calming influence on the mind, something like  a good arm chair, which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

    With John Bellany the viewer is never offered a ‘good arm chair ‘.

 He has the Hugh MacDiarmid volcanic vigour:

‘I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be whaur 
Extremes meet - it’s the only way I ken 
To dodge the curst conceit o’ bein’ richt 
That damns the vast majority o’ men.

Indeed there is in ‘paragone’ the idea of poetry and art contending dialectically: sharing excellence and supremacy. Simonides of Ceos, the Greek lyric poet wrote, “the poem is a speaking picture, the painting mute poetry’

 Perhaps as Norman McCain suggested on the death of Grieve/MacDiarmid (let’s have three minutes of pandemonium) we should all bring brushes and paint and celebrate the work and life: the life of work; of John Bellany, pain-ter.

Thom Cross

Carluke