A restless wave | John Bellany at Lemon Street Gallery, Truro

John Bellany (1942-2013) Time, 1998. Oil on canvas, 90 x 90 cms.

In 1988 the Scottish figurative expressionist painter John Bellany was given a liver transplant by the pioneering surgeon Sir Roy Calne. “When he came to afterwards,” Calne later remembered, “he asked not for analgesics, but for paper and paint.” 

Bellany had had liver disease for years, despite giving up alcohol in 1985, and his brush with death – and new lease of life – galvanised his art practice, enabling him to ‘see colours he hadn’t seen before’. Colne allowed him to turn his convalescence room into an art studio, and the artist immediately produced a poignant new body of work, known as the Addenbrookes Hospital Series.

Bellany was the son and grandson of fishermen in Port Seton, near Edinburgh, brought up as a strict Calvinist in that harsh environment. His artistic talent enabled him to escape, and rebel. He attended Edinburgh College of Art in the 60s and, having travelled extensively in Europe, developed a style equally influenced by the great European Realist Masters, such as Goya, Courbet and Velazquez, and 20th-century expressionists such as Otto Dix and Max Beckmann. A visit to Buchenwald in 1967 made a searing impression on him, and on his subsequent art.

He was always a symbolist, using recurring motifs, which he refused to explain to interviewers. This piece, painted in 1998, is titled Time, and includes several of common symbols, such as the Ace of Diamonds playing card, and the triangular-headed cat. The grandfather clock clearly acts as a memento mori. The central figure is recognisable as his wife, Helen, who he married in the 60s, divorced in the 70s, and remarried in the 80s after the suicide of his second wife, Juliet. It was Helen who persuaded him to give up drinking, and to undergo the transplant. In 2018 she wrote a well-received memoir about their relationship, titled The Restless Wave.

In 1991 Bellany painted a diptych, depicting Sir Roy Calne operating on him in Addenbrookes, which is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. In November 2012 the artist was honoured with a 70th-birthday retrospective exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He died in August 2013, aged 71. Several of his works, including Time, are currently on show at the Lemon Street Gallery’s September Show, at Withiel Sculpture Garden, in Truro, Cornwall. Lemon Street Gallery have a stand on the ground floor of British Art Fair 2023.