John Bellany - As I knew him

On Wednesday, 28th September, 2013, John Bellany, the Scottish artist died "clutching a paintbrush as he took his final breath." (You can read the rest in The Scotsman)

The BBC showed a documentary, directed by one of his own sons. It is well worth watching, but it gives little away about the nature of his work and just tantalizing glimpses into his methods. Bellany said, "If a painting must have anything, it must have intensity". Certainly, if you know his work, you can see the proof of this. The caveat is that there is probably not one painting of his that I could ever bear to have on my wall.

There may of course be another reason why I am not, let's say, sympathetic to his work.

I knew John Bellany. He was my personal tutor at art college in 1972/3. During term time I would see him more or less every day and more or less every day he would arrive very late, drunk and disorderly. If we were lucky, he would simply disappear with a bottle into his tiny office and we could get on with painting. But occasionally he would give us the benefit of his drunken rage. He once lifted me against a wall and threatened to beat me up. I learnt nothing from the man, partly because I was still in my teens and not that teachable, but mainly because he was unable or unwilling or both to share any of his talent with us. He was a violent yob and his contribution to the education of young artists, at least during that period, was to primarily de-motivate and distress. By his own admission, he was a bastard.

I find it personally sickening that someone who spent most of his life making the lives of others a misery (see what his family have said on record) that there should now be an outpouring of sentimentality about him now that he is dead.

As strange as it is sometimes in life, decades later I moved to Scotland to live, about five miles from Bellany's hometown of Port Seton. On the occasional visit there the memories would come flowing back, of a young man, quite confused and at sea emotionally, being abused by an arrogant, violent drunkard.

I did not complete my course at Art College and left after a year. My life up to that point had been damaged by my father, also a violent drunken alcoholic. He had long gone, but those days in the art room were no different. Only the actors had changed, not the characters. It was too much for me to bear.

Bellany leaves a legacy of work that is prolific, intense and individual, but it will never atone for the people whose lives he damaged and whose hopes he destroyed.