John Bellany

John Bellany, born 1942, helped change the course of painting in Scotland. His intensely felt paintings of fisherfolk and their precarious life at sea were a direct challenge to the much diluted Scottish colourist tradition and its landscapes and still lifes. The sheer size and raw emotion of Bellany’s canvases, their depictions of a way of life that the artist knew from growing up in a Port Seton fishing family – and their elevation of that life onto a symbolic level – were at odds with the decorative, drawing-room pictures of much contemporary Scottish painting in the 1960s.

This book will mark John Bellany’s seventieth birthday and will accompany the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of John Bellany’s work since the National Galleries of Scotland organised the retrospective in 1986. The fully illustrated catalogue will illustrate paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints from all the key periods of the artist’s career.