The late 1960s were a crucial point in Bellany’s evolution as an artist. Following a degree at Edinburgh College of Art he continued his studies at the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in 1968. More significantly, in the previous year, he had visited East Germany on a cultural scholarship, discovering a range of German artists and attending the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Unsurprisingly this had a significant impact on the young artist, and in the ensuing years he produced paintings that helped process the emotional distress he experienced subsequently.
Artist and writer Janet McKenzie remembers,
‘When I interviewed him in 2010, he recalled that, following the visit to Buchenwald, it took him many years to reconcile the experience of the Holocaust, and he was only able to do so through the creative process, through the visualisation of the sense of the dichotomous – horror and beauty – that constitutes the human condition . . . Bellany’s relentless struggle to make sense of the split between the love found in family bonds, in nature, in the human spirit in many instances, and the abject terror and evil that humans are capable of. These polar opposites drove him on a daily basis.’