John Bellany

see http://bellany.com/biog.html http://www.markbarrowfineart.com/bellany_biog.htm 3-18-2011Public CollectionsAberdeen Art GalleryArts Council of Great BritainBelfast PolytechnicBritish CouncilBritish Museum, LondonChesser House, EdinburghContemporary Art SocietyDundee Central Museum and Art GalleryEdinburgh CorporationFerens Art Gallery, HullFitzwilliam Museum, CambridgeGlasgow Art Galleries and MuseumsGovernment Art CollectionHatton Gallery, University of Newcastle-upon-TyneHunterian Art Gallery, University of GlasgowJ F Kennedy Library, BostonKassa Kasser Museum, New YorkKirkcaldy Museum and Art GalleryLeeds City Art GalleryLeicester Museum and Art GalleryMaclaurin Art Gallery, AyrMetropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkMiddlesborough Art GalleryMuseum of Boca Raton, FloridaMuseum of LondonMuseum of Modern Art, New YorkNational Gallery of Art, GdanskNational Gallery of Modern Art, DublinNational Gallery of Poland, WarsawNational Library of Congress, WashingtonNational Portrait Gallery, LondonNational Portrait Gallery, ScotlandNew York Public LibraryPerth Museum and Art GalleryRoyal College of Art, LondonScottish Arts CouncilScottish National Gallery of Modern Art, EdinburghScottish National Portrait Gallery, EdinburghSheffield City Art GallerySouthampton City Art GallerySwindon Museum and Art GalleryTate Gallery, LondonUniversity of Western Australia, PerthVictoria and Albert Museum, LondonWhitworth Art Gallery, ManchesterWolverhampton Municipal Art Gallery and MuseumZuider Zee Museum, HollandJohn Bellany studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art under Sir Robin Phillipson from 1960 to 1965. During this time he gained an Andrew Grant Scholarship in 1962, taking him to Paris and in 1965 he received a Postgraduate Travelling Scholarship enabling him to travel to Holland and Belgium. He went on to attend the Royal College of Art, London, where he studied under Carel Weight and Peter de Francia from 1965 to 1968. Bellany went on to be Lecturer in Painting at Brighton College of Art in 1968 and from 1969 to 1973 was Lecturer in Painting at Winchester College of Art, Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art and at Goldsmiths College of Art. From 1978 to 1984 he was Lecturer in Painting at Goldsmiths College of Art and was Artist in Residence at Victoria College of the Arts, Melbourne in 1983.Bellany’s first solo exhibitions were held at the Dromidaris Gallery, Holland (1965), at Edinburgh College of Art (1968) and at Winchester School of Art (1969). From 1970 he exhibited in one-man shows annually throughout the UK. His first international solo exhibition was held at Rosa Esman Gallery, New York in 1982 and this quickly led to a string of exhibitions on the continent and throughout the world. In 1986 he was given the first one-man show ever to be held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, centred around his portrait of Ian Botham, commissioned by the NPG. He also had a one-man show at the National Portrait Gallery, Scotland in 1994, exhibiting his portrait of the composer, Peter Maxwell Davis commissioned by the gallery; this was surrounded by other works by Bellany, held in its collection.Retrospectives of his work were held in 1983 (touring the UK, the United States and Australia), in 1986 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 1988 at the Ruth Siegel Gallery, New York and at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund (1988-89). Bellany is having a major exhibition entitled 'Bellany in Italy', at the Ricci Foundation, Barga, Tuscany in 2002. His work has also been included in many key group exhibitions both nationally and internationally since 1963.Among Bellany’s numerous awards are the Burston Award at the Royal College of Art (1965), John Moores Prize Winner (1980), Major Arts Council Award (1981), Athena International Art Award ((joint first-prize winner, 1985) and the Royal Academy’s Wollaston Award (1987). In 1992 he received a British Council visit to Central Europe and in 1993 he won the Korn/Ferry Picture of the Year Award at the Royal Academy. His commissions include murals for Chesser House, Edinburgh (commissioned by the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in 1965) and the portraits of Lord Renfrew and Sir Roy Caine (commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery, London).Bellany was elected Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1988 and in 1994 was awarded the CBE. He went on to be given an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Edinburgh in 1996 and an Honorary D Lit by Heriot Watt, University of Edinburgh in 1998. He was elected RA in 1991 (ARA 1986), Honorary Member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1986, and in 1998 was made a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art, London. John Bellany lives and works in Cambridge, Edinburgh and Barga, Italy. Recent Solo Exhibitions2000 Beaux Arts, LondonSolomon Gallery, Dublin1998-99 Elaine Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, Florida1998 Beaux Arts, London1997 Beaux Arts, London1996 Peacock Gallery, AberdeenMacGeary Gallery, BrusselsGaleria Kin, Mexico1995 Terry Dintenfass Gallery, New YorkEdinburgh Festival ExhibitionTalbot Rice Gallery, University of EdinburghStrathclyde University Gallery, Glasgow1994 Beaux Arts, Bath1993 Flowers East Gallery, LondonBerkeley Square Gallery, London1992 Flowers East Gallery, LondonKelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow1991 Fitzwilliam Museum, CambridgeFischer Fine Art, London1990 Raab Gallery, BerlinRuth Siegel Gallery, New YorkCompass Gallery, Glasgowhttp://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/online_az/4:322/?initial=B&artistId=4527&artistName=John%20Bellany&submit=1 (June 22, 2009)John Bellany (Scottish, born 1942) Bellany was born in the fishing village of Port Seton, near Edinburgh. He studied at Edinburgh College of Art and at the Royal College of Art, London. His work of the 1960s and 1970s deals with original sin, guilt, sex and death. His characteristic paintings are large compositions featuring his own personal symbolism, often derived from the sea and from religion, two elements that dominated his childhood. The flawed nature of humanity is usually central to his paintings. Bellany became seriously ill in the 1980s and underwent a liver transplant operation in 1988, after which his work became more optimistic in mood.http://www.exploreart.co.uk/artistic_styles_details.asp?ArtistID=5&ArtisticStyleID=5 3-18-2011Born at Port Seton in 1942 into a family of fishermen and boat builders, John Bellany’s art is often inspired by the sea and profoundly religious in nature.Throughout his career he has painted elemental allegories encompassing the complexities of the human condition. Following studies at the Edinburgh College of Art, he moved to London in 1965 to study at the Royal College, his vision and iconography becoming broader.In the Seventies, when his personal life was in turmoil, he embarked on a near-fatal journey of self-destruction, which is reflected in the angst-ridden images in the paintings of the period. This was further reinforced in 1976 by a traumatic visit to the remains of the Buchenwald concentration camp. But Bellany’s life voyage has proved every bit as perilous as the sea voyages of his fishing ancestors - in the Eighties he successfully underwent a liver transplant, which inspired a remarkable series of pictures started, to the astonishment of his surgeon, within hours of regaining consciousness from the operation.His towering example has inspired a new pride in Scottish artists; a fact duly recognised when he received the CBE. His paintings are in the collections of major museums and art galleries throughout the world, including the National Galleries of Scotland, The Tate Gallery, The Museum of Modern Art, New Your, and the Metropolitan Museum, New York. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/02/john-bellany 1-31-2014John Bellany obituaryScottish painter whose work was characterised by brutality, torment and compassionJanet McKenzie - The Guardian, Monday 2 September 2013 12.33 EDT The paintings of the Scottish artist John Bellany, who has died aged 71 after a long illness, confronted issues of mortality, evil and the individual's capacity for survival. His career was dominated by the circumstances of his own turbulent life: the act of painting, in which he employed a personal language at once realist, expressionist and surrealist, enabled him to overcome alcoholism and survive several near-death episodes. He was prone to severe depression, had a liver transplant, and in 1985 suffered the death of his second wife, Juliet Gray. The following year he remarried his first wife, Helen Percy.The drawings and etchings that Bellany did in the 1980s faced up to the seeming inevitability of his death from alcoholism: he produced the grimly candid Self-Portrait, Addenbrooke's Hospital (1988) just hours after coming round from his transplant operation. His capacity for triumphant perseverance for a further quarter century was celebrated in the retrospective John Bellany: A Passion for Life at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2012-13). He battled with alcoholism, had a liver transplant and lived for another 25 years. This confrontational and complex approach was largely at odds with the abstraction dominant in the 1960s, when he was a student. In 1967 he visited the site of Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, in Germany, which made a searing impression on him. While Scottish artists of his own and previous generations were often inspired by the French tradition, Bellany looked closer to home, encouraged by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid. He took inspiration from literature and from the culture of his own community, in the form of a potent mix of Celtic mythology and the Calvinistic guilt that sprang from the religious fundamentalism of John Knox.This fear of the almighty ran in tandem with a deep respect for the power of the sea. Born and brought up in Port Seton, east along the coast from Edinburgh, John was the son of Agnes and Richard Bellany, both from families of fishermen and boatbuilders. He first went out to sea on a fishing boat at the age of eight and his holiday job as a teenager consisted of gutting fish. His early awareness of the precariousness of survival at sea was reflected in boyhood paintings of boats, strange creatures such as huge skates and dismembered fish.From Preston Lodge high school he went to Edinburgh College of Art (1960-65) and the Royal College of Art, London (1965-68). He portrayed members of his family in a naturalistic vein, as in the drawing My Grandmother (1967), and continued to employ maritime imagery, as in Star of Bethlehem (1966), with a dour, apparently loveless couple standing up to their knees in dead fish in the boat of that name. Bellany's awareness of the Calvinistic worldview of hellfire and brimstone, of deep anxiety towards activities of the flesh and of fear of the consequences of sin linked him to the Renaissance world of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel. Twentieth-century influences included Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka and the Australian painter Arthur Boyd.Bellany created expressionist allegories indicating the struggle to adhere to the uncompromising values that define individual morality. He made it clear in discussion that the grey-haired figure with his head in his hands in Haunted Soul (1990) expressed the tension between the shame associated with man's physical existence and the essential good of spiritual life. Grotesque images of beasts killing or being killed are charged with fear, though the bestiality implied in slaughtering other creatures for one's own survival was utterly alien to Bellany's own nature, which sought to attain "a oneness of being".Sexual guilt and the "devil in the bottle" contributed to his tormented images. His watercolour Self-Portrait (1987) incorporates a mask, a cat and a self-portrait by Van Gogh behind him. The signature, Giovanni Bellini, links an Italianised form of his name to a prosecco and peach cocktail, and is followed by the words Confessions of a Justified Sinner. As Edward Lucie-Smith has pointed out, the self-portrait gives the artist particular scope for linking his work to the great practitioners of the past.In common with the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which inspired a number of paintings and prints, Bellany's life and work were characterised by brutality, compassion and a deeply felt generosity towards others. His identification with their suffering ultimately revealed itself in stoicism. With Boyd, Bellany shared a predilection for references to art-historical sources, literature and the Bible. The Fright (1968) finds a couple sitting up in a bed – though one resembling the funeral rails of a hearse more than a conventional marital refuge. Behind them is a black and white mass suggesting a whale with all its implied glory and terror, and alongside them blue and white stripes suggesting Buchenwald prison garb or a stretch of water. The vessel they are on is all at sea: in art as in literature, a waterborne ship is often a metaphor for the soul. The application of paint is aggressive and intentionally disturbing; the allusions and interpretations are multiple; and there is an echo of Edvard Munch's The Scream.The Fright appeared in Bellany's diploma show at the RCA. There followed teaching posts in Brighton, Winchester and London, till Bellany was himself a lecturer at the RCA in the mid-1980s. His work was acquired for major collections: the National Portrait Gallery (depicting himself alongside Sir Roy Calne, the surgeon who saved his life, and the cricketer Ian Botham), Tate Britain, and in New York, both the Metropolitan and Modern Art museums. With international success came houses in Saffron Walden, in Essex, and Barga, in Tuscany. Bellany was made an RA in 1991 and appointed CBE in 1994.His first marriage to Helen lasted for a decade from 1964, and during their second she saw him through the darkest days of his illness. She survives him, as do their two sons, daughter and eight grandchildren.• John Bellany, artist, born 18 June 1942; died 28 August 2013