John Bellany: potent, prolific, patchy

When John Bellany died in August last year, an odyssey that had alternately beguiled and infuriated the art world came to an end. Famously, Bellany had nearly died from liver failure in 1988 after years of hard drinking, but an organ transplant saved his life and gave him another 25 years of painting.

Although his health was latterly precarious (he had a near-fatal heart attack in 2005) he was determined to continue working. His output was prodigious, but inevitably tended to be uneven. As both the artist and his sympathetic biographer, John McEwen, admitted, Bellany’s post-1970 work requires strict editing. (Bellany confessed that he had to paint a dozen pictures to get one beauty. Unfortunately, too many of the also-rans have found their way onto the art market.) On the other hand, his early work is exceptionally powerful: raw and dark, it draws heavily on the almost medieval upbringing that Bellany enjoyed in the fishing village of Port Seton, on the East coast of Scotland.