The Herald - The Herald Magazine
The quirky nature of John Byrne is captured in a new exhibition
JAN PATIENCE
THE interesting thing about looking and writing about art is that I am constantly challenging myself and my perceptions. I don’t have any sort of moral or academic high ground on which to base my views or opinions apart from the fact I am looking. A lot. To be honest, if I don’t like something, I tend to move on and not to write about it. I like to think I tell the story of art and artists on these pages rather than foisting my own cobbled-together views on readers. You can, of course, be the judge of that.
In the 13 years I’ve been writing about art for The Herald, my children have grown into young adults with vociferous opinions of their own.
When they were very young, I used to drag them to exhibitions all the time and their observations cut through any pretensions and made me laugh out loud (#lol).
A few years ago, my son declared loudly in the echoey environs of Edinburgh’s Inverleith House that an installation by Karla Black in a window was “nothing more than a collection of plastic bags”.
Last Saturday, when my 16-year-old daughter was looking at the work of John Byrne at 80 at Glasgow Print Studio (GPS), she casually observed that a monotype called Untitled (Hand I) with watercolour and drawing in ink and pencil “would probably have been marked down” if she had submitted it in her Higher Art portfolio because it didn’t fit the proscribed criteria and would be “too cartoony”. “I like it though”, she said breezily before moving on.
The work in question shows the palm of a big hand with fingers spread wide; its crooked pinkie twisting off to the side like Gourock. There’s an alarmedlooking cartoonish face on the palm of this hand, which has a tattooed plinth for a neck. To the left, an accusatory hand with a pointed finger emerges from a suit cuff, complete with cufflinks. So far, so John Byrne.
John Byrne at 80 and Dear John, A Thirty Year Portrait by photographer, David Eustace, are the first exhibitions out of the GPS starting blocks postlockdown. And what a welcome return it is. John Byrne at 80 is a retrospective exhibition of about 70 original prints (including several mixed-media works)
portraits in the John Byrne exhibition, the smaller David Eustace exhibition takes a quieter walk through the past three decades of Byrne’s life.
Former prison officer Eustace, whose photographs have appeared everywhere from Vogue to Tatler to The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, captures Byrne’s mischief and his humanity.
As my esteemed colleague Keith Bruce once observed, it’s hard to take a bad picture of Byrne, a man who redefines the word dandy. Without denigrating Eustace’s work in any way, I’d concur. There’s a cracking shot that shows Byrne’s watercolours spilling into a desk beside a battered old leather folio-style case. Sitting on top of the case is a strip of passport-style pictures of Byrne in a tartan jacket.
Eustace first photographed Byrne in 1989 and he has become not just his friend but his most revisited subject. Dear John, A Thirty Year Portrait, comprises of 13 photographic portraits of Byrne, one of which was specially commissioned by GPS for this exhibition. This work is available to purchase as a stand-alone piece, while the other 12 are only available as part of the limited edition portfolio (priced at £7,200).
For a bigger picture of a towering figure on the Scottish arts scene, head to Glasgow Print Studio now. You won’t be disappointed,
John Byrne at 80 & Dear John, A Thirty Year Portrait, Glasgow Print Studio, Trongate 103, Glasgow, G1 5HD, 0141 552 0704, www. glasgowprintstudio.co.uk, Tuesday-Friday 11am-5pm. Until October 30. Free (Enter through King Street entrance. No need to book but masks must be worn)
FROM old “biddies”, to birds, boats, belted Galloway cattle and beyond, painter, Gordon Wilson, below, returns time after time to a series of motifs. It is through this highly personal landscape, that Wilson, an ebullient character in “real life”, charts and navigates the world around him. Floods and plagues included…
At the start of 2020, with a year of deadlines ahead – including working towards a major solo show with the Annan Gallery in Glasgow – Wilson’s studio in Milngavie, East Dunbartonshire, was badly flooded. The future looked grim when we all moved into lockdown in March, but Wilson managed to relocate to a bigger studio. There he found the space to think big and to paint bigger. He has now painted about 40 new works for this show, including some of his biggest works to date. The biggest painting, Splendid Isolation, with the splendid price of £7,500, sold on the opening day of the exhibition last Saturday. It forms the centrepiece of Being Gordon Wilson and its narrative is based around a puffer with one of his old raincoated “biddies” at the bow, a seagull sitting atop her head. The puffer is called Isolation. In another painting, called Biddy Beatification, another old biddy is descending heavenwards from what could be a cityscape. The toes on her sensible shoes are turned in and her shopping bags in either hand are helping her rise up. Poignantly, there’s a halo-like glow around her head-scarved head. Both are prime examples of Wilson’s ability to create joyous, yet tender, scenes without descending into whimsy.