When the painter John Bellany regained consciousness after his liver transplant operation at Addenbrooke's Hospital in 1988, he saw a nurse standing beside him but couldn't quite believe she was real. He reached out to touch her and then, unable to speak because he was wearing an oxygen mask, he signalled for a piece of paper and wrote on it: "Can I draw you?"
The last thing he had done, working late into the night before the eight-hour operation, was to finish a portrait of one of his doctors - because he thought he might not survive to finish it later. Now that he had survived, his first instinct was to make a portrait sketch with a faltering, unsteady hand. He added a note along the bottom of the page: "I will live. I will be OK."
He did live and he is OK. As his exhibition in Dublin attests, he is still working hard, still exuberant and inventive. His life and work are indissolubly linked. "I paint, therefore I am," could be his motto, and a great deal of his art forms a pictorial, allegorical autobiography, a sprawling, picaresque yarn bursting with vitality and character, wildly imaginative and marked by remarkable iconographic consistency.
Recurrent images of Bellany himself, his wife Helen and other symbolic figures, boats, the sea, sea birds, fish and various land animals, emblematic objects such as playing cards, clocks and mirrors make up a shorthand visual language capable of infinite permutation. And most of this imagery has its origins in his early background.
Recurrent images of Bellany himself, his wife Helen and other symbolic figures, boats, the sea, sea birds, fish and various land animals, emblematic objects like such as playing cards, clocks and mirrors make up a shorthand visual language capable of infinite permutation. And most of this imagery has its origins in his early background.
He was born in Port Seton, a fishing village on the Firth of Forth, in 1942, and grew up in a world that "could well be described as medieval," as the critic John McEwen wrote. The small fishing communities were ruled on one side by the sea, and on the other by Scottish Calvinism. Both were severe taskmasters. This environment provided Bellany with a self-contained vision of the world, a vision so strong that in the psychedelic 1960s, while Britain partied, Bellany, prompted by a visit to Buchenwald, was painting grim premonitory images, full of edgy anxiety, that strangely prefigure the darker days that descended on Eastern Europe in the latter part of the century.
It would be unfair to imply that his childhood was all doom and gloom, however. It was in most respects enormously positive, with a powerful sense of community and a celebratory feeling for life's value. Bellany loves the sea and is passionate about boats, having drawn and painted them from his earliest years. His father built boats, full-size boats and extraordinarily detailed scale models. And the boat, the ark of life, is perhaps the dominant motif in his work.
A feisty Scot taking on the art establishment, as a student and a young artist he was an incredibly energetic, opinionated presence on the scene. His early pictures of the fishing community hold up very well, revealing him as a fine draughtsman, a gifted painter with a brilliant compositional sense - and a hard worker, whose productivity amazed his teachers. He self-consciously modelled his style on northern Europeans such as Bruegel and Bosch and Munch rather than the Mediterranean painters. More recently, Beckmann and Kokoschka stand out as notable influences, though he is a little weary of being compared with Beckmann.
It is hard to believe, in the light of his current work which revels in brilliant primaries, that he was for decades distinctly wary about colour. Perhaps it is no accident that his conversion to colour coincided with crucial events in his personal life.
In 1964, he had married Helen Percy, from Golspie in the far north of Scotland. But as time went by Helen felt increasingly isolated and abandoned, and the eventual break-up of the marriage, in 1974, was, for her, a question of self-preservation.
Bellany suffered a breakdown and retreated to Port Seton. He recovered, took up a teaching post and remarried. But beneath the surface, he was still in trouble. His tremendous energy masked heavy drinking and failing health. His second wife, Juliet, was beset by health problems, and work became increasingly dark. The clocks in his paintings suggested he knew that time was running out. A picture of a gambler had a death's head. In other works, figures perched precariously on tightropes or walked the plank. Then, in 1985, both Juliet and his father died.
Ironically, as he suffered these personal griefs and his health steadily deteriorated, he gained increasing critical acclaim. With opportunities multiplying, his career gathered momentum. More significantly, Helen re-entered his life and, in 1986, they married for the second time. She knew that he was dying and on several occasions he almost died, before, she says, a kind of panic prompted her to raise the question of a liver transplant. It was as he was recuperating, producing a series of self-portraits, that, in the middle of a letter to an old friend, he wrote, in capitals: "Colour is the most important thing." He hasn't looked back since.
John Bellany's paintings are at the Solomon Gallery, Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, Dublin, until May 2nd.
