Oration - John Bellany CBE RA

It is fitting that in the year of The Homecoming we should welcome home and honour an internationally renowned painter, a son of East Lothian, born and bred in Port Seton.

The Port Seton of his youth, and of many of his paintings, was a place of the sea, of the harsh rituals and superstitions of fishing, the religious observations of a Scottish Sabbath, the frail wooden boats which were men’s livelihood, and whose confident names Good Hope, Harvest Queen, Star of Bethlehem defied the arbitrariness of the waves’ power to claim lives. But he is also a citizen of a wider world, a man who has lived and worked and taught in England and now in Tuscany. And to return to the image of the sea, he is a man whose life’s voyage has been full of struggle against, and triumph over, despair and illness.

A school friend recalls that, as a child, John’s haversack was always bursting with paint brushes. Art was what he did. A few years later this same friend, about to follow in John’s footsteps to Edinburgh College of Art, asked his advice about student life. “Always do your own thing,” came the uncompromising answer, “Don’t follow trends. Be your own person.” After graduating from Edinburgh, John won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London where he scored the highest essay mark of his year.

We say often enough of painting that “we know what we like”. What we really mean is that we like what we know; a Madonna and Child full of grace and beauty, the picturesque of a familiar landscape. John’s paintings offer little of the comfort of the familiar. His biographer, John McEwen, has suggested that he is the only western artist in the last half century to have been brought up in a society that could almost be called medieval, and John’s paintings reflect the eternal cycle of human existence as it struggles with elemental forces; the sea, survival, sex, death. His brush strips people to the heart of their being. In Cockenzie Fish Gutters, the women work at their trade but gaze out emotionless at the viewer. The bright blue and yellow of their workplace contrasts with the pale pink slop of fish gut and stained water in the tray at the bottom of the frame which divides them from us by time and space. Their stare fixes on us, timeless and unflinching.

After two close encounters with death, John’s vision has taken a more optimistic turn. Now it is flowers, images of Italy where he lives and works, and paintings in China, which are his subjects, full of softer colours and the joys of life. Last year his painting of Macduff harbour, with the red hulled boat Margaret Jane safely home, was the official Christmas card of the First Minister. Until last week it was on display at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh.

“Always do your own thing. Don’t follow trends. Be your own person.” His words are an example to us all. They are words which we would commend to all of our students.

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