When I visited the wonderful John Bellany self-portraiture exhibition at City Art Gallery in Edinburgh on Friday 4th June, there was also another exhibition (on Modern Scottish Art) containing one other Bellany painting, that painting known as Obsession. Photography was banned so I rely on internet photographs to mark or note memories not my own. These photographsappear to come from books.
Bellany’s past – his father was a fisherman, and he was born on the coastal border at Eyemouth – makes up the subject matter. What marks the day of fishing families such as his own and this representation of them is a pile of dead fish but that pyramidal dead cold structure is less remarkable, less notable, than the marks that distort the faces of his human figures and their locked-in gestures – holding in those things they cannot show with huge hands. But what marked my day – and what I needed to note or mark – was visible precision of Bellany’s painterly marks on his canvas. After all, in Bellany’s work, that is constantly the source of his expressiveness (and expressionism in painting), even where he seems to want to achieve a flat finish on the surface of the painting.
He does the latter mainly in the early paintings, but look cloosely and even here the surface is marked – you see the path of each hair of his brush sometimes creating the look of a serration you think you ought to be able to see three-dimensionally but cannot. It leaves the serration as an effect in the mind or heart – I needed / wanted to photograph it to keep the marks and notes it made IN me out there in shared space and time, not seeping into my gutted being.
Speaking of gutted beings – there they are, the fish, who so became part of Bellany’s sense of body – the ubiquitous skate oft providing both mask and representation of inner being, with a phallic dangling anatomy to replace the phallus in himself that so fascinated and revolted the man about his man-ness, sex/gender relationships and the passage of floundering tongues. His painting The Kiss says it all – though married three times (twice at either end to the same woman, Helen) he claimed to hate the knotting containment of marriage, where tongues flounder against each other:
It is a theme of the self-portraiture exhibition that Bellany’s life and painting moved from a solid representation of the artist as a Scottish socialist warrior, a revival of Hugh MacDiarmid’s Scottish Renaissance, to a more marked being – torn open by life, art – and, of course, the heavy drinking culture imbibed with the earlier self-representation until it killed him. For Bellany the liver transport necessitated by his alcoholism had always been on cards for life marked him by digging into his internals. And here you have to show Prometheus III (1989), a star of the show, but (and here I can’t help but gloat because on the insistence on no photographs at the Gallery) printed in entirely the wrong orientation in the catalogue. Hence, I have to use another source for my photograph (McEwen’s biography):
Prometheus was another rebel in the cause of humanity, punished by a God keen to have his power unchallenged, to have his liver eaten nightly by eagles (and then magically restored by day to allow the suffering to endure – Gods are clever like that. Shelley and Tony Harrison empty out this myth in their respective verse dramas). Bellany is Prometheus, painted as a Janus, facing his past and present pain in one face-direction, trying to maintain future optimism in the other. His eagle is a puffin, with the sharper beak of a toucan – his animals (including fish) are metamorphic and liminal – a symbol he used often to represent himself. Later the actual operation becomes the mark of Cain – in himself as a gutted fish in Enigma (1993) – not in the exhibition:
In the exhibition however, is Only an Emu Passing By (1985), in which the phallic neck of the birds rhymes with the gushing from inside his body – his liver perhaps – of blood that looks like a huge phallic bloody body of flesh – here there is less flatness and much impasto.
What was inside and covered long troubled Bellany, as he looked (in a favourite drawing of mine of the exhibition – not in the catalogue though I found it online) Through a Glass Darkly (using I Corinthians 13:12 in its title but the lettering on the drawing recalls the cover of Lewis Carroll’s second Alice Book Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice found There) a wine glass.
What is notable and leaves marks – of ink in drawing, impasto in oils, are those things that expose you but may still be hard to interpret – the love of your child (become in memory a flounder – or other dead fish – cradled cold – or a warm-blooded instinctual animal – such as the monkey in You’re 30 Today, John (1972).
I think I will leave it there, except to remark on a strange deja vu of the day. On the way to Edinburgh, I typed a blog on my phone (see it at this link). In it, I said:
Bellany is, as a knowledgeable, and a dear friend says, ‘artist’s artist’. That makes sense. I have loved him for long as a kind of Scottish Ulysses, who looked for ages to reconcile those images that would elsewise be entirely personal fragments.
I thought the attribution to Ulysses my own, although I suspect it may come from a memory of reading some time ago Bellany’s biography by John McEwen, who also presents the painter as a literal and symbolic wanderer, but at the end of the exhibition is a letter by Bellany (in a vitrine) that says he excepts that a wandering seaman is the ideal representation of him – adding – “(like Odysseus)”. I am Ulysses, says Bellany – if only I could have photographed this. Instead, look at the various marks and notes of the literary in the 1987 self-portrait The Old Man and the Sea – Homecoming.
The title brings together the motifs – Hemingway’s great late novel, his father’s life, the nostos of Odysseus /Ulysses, and in a sea beset by sharks. And Bellany’s face – aged. The sea is a mess of impasto. A beautiful painting.
But see even Bellany’s operation as a chance too for him to open up himself, even erase his face in doing so, and to draw more impasto blood than there could have been. And to stare at the logo of the hospital linen cleaning service as if it I spoke of a great social conspiracy. And perhaps it does! The following nor in the exhibition.
All I got, bye for now.
Let’s see what marks and notes this actual day will leave on me. We go to Barter Books in Alnwick. When I tried to type ‘marks’, ‘sharks’ was chosen by the automatic editor. That eastern sea coast can be bloody.
Love Steven xxxxxx
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