A Portrait of the Artist's Wife

This review of the ongoing John Bellany exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh appeared in The Herald newspaper on Saturday 8th August. .
It's part of the wider Edinburgh Art Festival, which runs throughout August.


I took this picture of Helen Bellany, the artist's wife, in front of a huge painting which takes over an entire wall, called A Long Day’s Journey into Day. It was painted in 1987 and celebrates the couple’s remarriage and the promise of a second chance.

THE first painting you clap eyes on when you walk into a new exhibition of work in Edinburgh’s Open Eye Gallery by the late John Bellany is the title artwork, Capercaillie Sings.
In contrast to some of other Bellany ‘Beezers’ on display (the artist’s own expression for painting with which he was best pleased), it’s a hopeful painting.
There’s the trademark Bellany sunset reds and yellows, the exuberant brushwork, an ever-watchful eye and an all-pervading sheen of mystery. For all that, it hums with optimism.
The artist’s wife, Helen Bellany, who has selected all the work in this exhibition, also chose the title of this exhibition. It’s the first show in the Open Eye’s 33-year history to take over the entire gallery space. It is also the first major display of Bellany’s work to be mounted following his death at the age of 72 on 28 August 2013.
Capercaillie Sings was painted by Bellany in 1984. At the time, he was in his early 40s and married to his second wife, Juliet Lister. Both Bellany and Lister were dogged by depression and she took her own life the following year. In 1986, Bellany remarried Helen, the mother of his three children. Some two years later, he had a liver transplant after years of struggling with alcoholism.
As Helen Bellany writes about the Capercaillie Sings in a foreword to the exhibition catalogue, “as [John’s] spirit is in the ascendant to good times once more, the voice is loud in proclamation of pure joie de vivre.”
When I speak to Helen just minutes after she has seen the work she has selected hung on the walls of the Open Eye for the first time, she tells me it was important that this element of her husband’s character shone through.
“There were two sides to his character,” she states. “He was a big character with a love of life but there was darkness too. And mystery. There was always mystery with John.”
For many art-lovers, the memory of The National Gallery of Scotland’s major survey of his work, John Bellany: A Passion for Life in 2012, is still fresh. This new exhibition is a much more intimate affair.
Helen Bellany met John when they were students at Edinburgh College of Art in 1962 and there is work on show here dating back to these days.
These early works, which includes an exquisite pencil drawing of Helen done in 1963 and a dazzling life study from 1964 called Sleeping Nude (an essay in nailing perspective), are among my favourite artworks in this show.
Giving over the whole gallery space to Bellany has allowed the Open Eye to place work into groups of drawings, prints and paintings, giving house-room to the many and various phases of his prolific output.
As Helen says, she found a ‘feast’ of ‘Beezers’ in the family collection. They span 50 years and encompass the themes for which Bellany is best known. His personal mythology is peppered with symbolism. The skull was always loitering with intent in the background of a Bellany. As was the sea. The son of a Port Seton fisherman, death was an ever-present figure which could knock on a door any minute.
There were other Bellany motifs. The mighty Bass Rock, cats, puffins, beaks, lighthouses, dogs, masks, playing cards, fish (often gutted) and sultry women looming over their lovers.
The joy in this exhibition is the chance to look at the work from various eras and to see themes emerging, not to mention changing moods.
It makes for a very personal intimate exhibition.
The lyrically beautiful watercolour, Helen at Cannes, painted in 1986, calls you up short. But for the innate draughtsmanship – and the distinctive Bellany eyes and palette – it could be by another artist.
Celtic Sacrifice, from 1972, is a powerful hymn to the destruction to all that was good in John and Helen’s first marriage, while the vast diptych, A Long Day’s Journey into Day, painted in 1987, celebrates the couple’s remarriage and the promise of a second chance.
Helen tells me she just finished writing her autobiography. Going by this exhibition, it’s going to be some read.
This exhibition, which is part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, is a Beezer of a show.

John Bellany: The Capercaillie’s Song, Open Eye Gallery, 34 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh, EH3 6QE, 0131 557 1020. Until 2 September