Description
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
142cm x 132cm (56in x 52in)
Footnote
Note:
John Bellany drew heavily on his background to create a compelling and instantly recognisable visual language. Born in 1942 in the small fishing town of Port Seton on the east coast of Scotland, his subject matter is informed by the experiences of his coastal upbringing and the folklore of his ancestry, connected to the ocean. The community was strictly Calvinist, and the rigidity of its guilt-inducing doctrine also permeates his work.
These contextual reference points were illustrated in Bellany's inventive figurative style. Though the aesthetic is entirely and distinctively his own, Bellany's compositions deliberately borrow from the religious tableaus of the Old Masters (including his frequent adoption of the triptych format), and his expressionistic representation of the human form and emotive use of colour from inter-war era German artists like Max Beckmann.
Like these artists before him, Bellany used visual symbols to represent and allude to moods and messages within his work. In Sea People, for example, he combines the traditional artistic motif of the dog - representative of matrimonial fidelity - and the owl - a cipher for wisdom -with his own invented stock of imagery. This includes a puffin's colourful beak, and a black-eyed and somewhat sinister seagull. They occupy the narrow deck of a fishing boat, sailing on an ominously still, intensely blue ocean. The captain of the ship, his face half obscured, bears a resemblance to the artist himself, and something or someone appears to be wearing the façade of the seagull as a cloak. It was painted in the early 1970s, a point when Bellany was increasingly reflecting on the human condition. In these monumental works, the ship represents our voyage through life to death. Deliberately impenetrable and oblique to the viewer, his paintings hold both deeply personal meaning whilst simultaneously hinting at more universal issues including fate, sex, guilt and death.