I always wanted to make a living from painting & I was always told it was impossible, but I didnae believe that.
Having holidays in the summer is a good thing. Sometimes other seasons as well. It gives you time to do the things you actually want to do & unless you’re a criminal for fun, this is also a good thing. Of course, I want to be in art galleries most of the time & it’s particularly good to get a new one under your belt. Even when I’m not going to a new one though, I want to go to ones I’ve already been in, so this summer I thought I’d keep a little record.
Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum has featured often in these blogs, mostly because I seem to find myself there each summer. Sometimes other seasons as well. So although the gallery’s not new to me, it has plenty of stuff I like to keep going back. Plus, it’s got a good “downstairs bit” that houses changing temporary exhibitions. Kelvingrove does a mean retrospective. Downstairs is the only section you have to pay for but they make it worth your while. I’ve done a Scottish Art Pick on John Byrne (b. 1940) in the past but one of the great shows I’ve seen so far this summer is a retrospective of his work & it goes to show you can’t have too much JB.
Named “A Big Adventure,” the exhibition held some well-known JB paintings that I’d seen in other places before. It made me think of those places & how annoying it can be to see an empty piece of wall that tells you the work is temporarily on loan to Wherever. “They should get themselves down here or it’ll serve them right,” I thought.
I suppose what I learned for the first time about JB as an artist was that he’d initially gone by the name of “Patrick,” his father’s (& his own middle) name. He invented a persona & back-story for this Patrick until such time he was given a successful exhibition in London, whereupon he confessed to the gallery. Thankfully they forgave him. It seems an odd thing to have done by any standards. Was it a lack of confidence in his ability? It’s even stranger when you know that much later in life JB discovered Patrick was not his biological father. In any case, these works have a particular look about them, a Rousseau-esque naivety & have an unsettling, almost dreamlike quality. You may find yourself deeply engaged by them whilst being disturbed or repelled at the same time. He will still sometimes sign as Patrick which reinforces another interesting fact about JB’s practice.
There are a few still life works in the exhibition but the majority are portraits or at least figurative works. Many of the portraits are of his friends – sometimes for friends - & family or people he has worked with. Because he’s some sort of genius & can turn his hand to any technique or style, he clearly selects media & styles that suit the people he’s depicting. When all these works are in the same room, it creates the illusion that different people might have made them. & because of this superb rejection of any sort of pigeonholing, he’s perhaps less well-celebrated, well-known & appreciated than he ought to be.
One of his more famous friends is Billy Connolly who he has painted a number of times. They knew one another in the days when BC was a musician before comedian. It was a time when JB was designing record covers for his friend Gerry Rafferty & others such as Donovan. What was new in this show was the second panel of his best (?) BC portrait which had previously been lost. JB just rustled up a new second panel for exhibition in 2017 & you wouldn’t know the difference.
His great interest in music has influenced his art as well as his writing. John Byrne has also written many plays, screenplays & a children’s book. It seems has catalogued them all through his visual art, whether in illustrations, poster art or sketches & paintings of working actors. “Tutti Frutti” won awards back in the day & as a young person I can remember it being on TV. It was the first we were seeing of Robbie Coltrane & Emma Thompson but little did I know that the writer of this amazing series was a painter first.
As the exhibition goes on to point out, then-youthful soon-to-be Hollywood actors Sean Penn, Kevin Bacon & Val Kilmer appeared in his play, “The Slab Boys” in 1983. What writers wouldn’t give for the chance to have this combination of actors in their productions nowadays!
By far my (& no doubt many other’s) section of the show contains an array of self portraits. As a body of work, this is perhaps his greatest achievement in the visual arts. Not only does it track the changes, the passing of time, the moods & trials of one man’s life but also the vast range of techniques & media at his disposal as an artist. This would be remarkable in itself but they reveal not only a man who is given to self-examination not only outside but in. We see different levels of vulnerability, humour, misery, whimsy & ego in each work.
There were a couple of films running at the exhibition & in one it is suggested that it’s this position of being successful in different roles or occupations that confuses people about JB & is offered as a potential reason that he’s not more widely known. This isn’t a new idea of course but it must be deeply frustrating for some. As if we should stick to one thing all our lives, whether in art or work or both. That you can’t succeed or specialise in more than one area. Thank goodness he clearly didnae believe that either.
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