John Bellany
Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London W1S
 

JOHN BELLANY’S (1942-2013) paintings are not for the faint hearted. Nor are they meant to be. As troubling as the wild East Lothian sea coast where he was born and reared, they also have tender and poetic passages evocative of the sudden bursts of sunshine in the calm after a storm.
 
Born in 1942 in Scotland’s sea faring Port Seton to a family of fishermen on both his parent’s side, he remained proud of this tough heritage which permeated his paintings throughout his life.  

Yet he broke his community’s seafaring tradition by becoming an artist, studying at the renowned Edinburgh College of Art from the age of 18 and then at London’s prestigious Royal College of Art.

There he was inspired and encouraged by one of his teachers, the Marxist painter Peter de Francia, and by his friend the Marxist critic John Berger. Both championed the social role of art and so, of figurative art at a time when the dominant critical aesthetic favoured abstraction. In 1966 Bellany wrote of his passionate: “belief in the revitalising of a dead tradition to the world.”