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John Byrne: 6 January 1940 - 30 November 2023

Past viewing_room
28 November - 23 December 2024
  • We are marking a year since John died. Our thoughts are with Jeanine, his children and his friends and family.
     
    John occupied a huge space creatively and culturally and as a friend. His absence is keenly felt. Our recent show of John’s work has brought many people to the gallery to remember him. Stories have been recounted from observations of his phenomenal work ethic both in the studio and the theatre and wonderment at the fertile workings of his mind all the way through to the mundane and John grappling with the realities of everyday life and the comedy that would ensue.
     
    We miss him tremendously and will remember today.
  • John’s formal life as an artist began aged 18 when he entered Glasgow School of Art. His mother said he started drawing in his pram. A year before entering the art school, he started at A F Stoddart & Co in Paisley - a “Technicolour hell hole” - as a “slab boy”. Much of what was to come, visually and literally, drew on what John observed there. In 1963 Byrne received a travelling scholarship to Italy after being awarded the Newbery Medal at GSA. He saw the great quattrocento painters: Giotto, Cimabue and Duccio. The light, the exquisite detail and stillness of the Italian primitives is all there in his work of the late 60s and early 70s.

  • John returned to the carpet factory in 1966 during which time he secured an exhibition - and his passport out...

    John returned to the carpet factory in 1966 during which time he secured an exhibition - and his passport out of factory life - at the Portal Gallery, London under the pseudonym “Patrick”. Having passed himself off as a self-taught naïf, he was given an exhibition. The dream-like images that made up the show met with success. His ruse was uncovered and from here he went on to design record covers for The Beatles, Billy Connolly and Gerry Rafferty; and to co-write songs with the latter.

     

    From the early 1970s John diversified into writing, designing and directing stage and screen productions: Writer's Cramp (1977) and then a story of three workers in a Paisley carpet factory who dream of escaping to pursue a life in rock and roll in The Slab Boys (1978). In 1986 he wrote the cult television series Tutti Frutti, starring Robbie Coltrane, Emma Thompson and Richard Wilson, which tells the story of the silver jubilee tour of the rock band The Majestics. This was followed by Your Cheatin' Heart - a comedy of Glasgow life set to a backdrop of country and western music. Perhaps because of the immense success of these productions his prodigious talent as an artist was temporarily over-shadowed. He didn’t stop, however, but continued instead to design theatre sets and costumes.

     

    Right: Card for first Portal Gallery exhibition, Dec 1967

  • On seeing John’s show at the Third Eye Centre in 1975, Arthur Watson PRSA, wrote: “The paintings counteracted the abstract orthodoxies of 1975 while also shedding his persona of Patrick. The facial acrobatics of the self-portraits, the monumental cigarette ends sculpted in paint, the double portrait of Billy Connolly and his banjo of the riotous ‘Kingarockinroll’; each work could have been expanded by a lesser artist into a stylistically coherent body of work, but here a stream of ideas exploded round the gallery walls, realised in a tour de force of painterly virtuosity.”

     

    In the decades that followed an extensive iconography unfolded amounting, in some cases, to a kind of pictorial autobiography. Paintings of 1950s Ferguslie Park - Feegie - captured what was once an invention, the “teenager”, as this strange new being emerged in the artist’s own youth. In his Underwood Lane series, the Teddy Boys who loiter are reminiscences of his own past. These pictures often referenced filmic and theatrical worlds, their backdrops lit like stage-sets. Nocturnal themes abounded: moonlit woods; the streets of 1950s Paisley; the self-examining artist, alone and wreathed in cigarette smoke. In a finely balanced act, he pulled together the macabre and humour.

     

    But back to oddballs: running through all of John’s work is the outsider, either as a lone figure or a fragment of society. The vision may be fantastical and magical but it’s what John knows.

     

    emily walsh
    The Fine Art Society

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    • 5A Oct 1972 Portal Gallery An Exhibition Of New Smaller Paintings
    • 3A Nov Dec 1969 Portal Gallery Patrick At Portal 3
    • 2 Nov Dec 1968 Portal Gallery Patrick At Portal
    • 6 June 1991 Portal Gallery Patrick S Day 1
  • Still from John Byrne STV Interview, 1975
    Still from John Byrne STV Interview, 1975
    • Screenshot 2024 11 29 At 16 52 20
    • Screenshot 2024 11 29 At 16 51 48
  • Installation views from John Byrne: Paintings and Drawings at Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, 1975
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    • Tfas Louise Long Selection One 15
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    • Photo 24 11 2017 10 25 59
    • 5 Letter Portal Gallery 2 3 June 1967
    • John Byrne RSA Mississippi Kite, 2017 signed and inscribed 'After the Mississippi Kite by Alexander Wilson who catalogued the birds of America' watercolour on paper 31 ½ x 23 inches
      John Byrne RSA
      Mississippi Kite, 2017
      signed and inscribed 'After the Mississippi Kite by Alexander Wilson who catalogued the birds of America'
      watercolour on paper
      31 ½ x 23 inches
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    • 2022 May 16 The Scotsman Jb At Fase
    • John Byrne The Times Scotland 23 06 20
  • Benoit is a boy living with his father in a small seaside village where nothing much goes on. Ships come in. Ships go out.
    But one day, Benoit’s father, Jean-Kiki, barters with a salty sea captain to get a friend for his lonely son, a kitten he names Donald. And that’s the end of Benoit’s quiet days.
     
    These unpublished text pages for the childrens' book Donald and Benoit were part of John's original vision for the project.
    They were not included in the final published version, with the publisher opting to use standardised printed text to help children read along.
    • John Byrne RSA, Come Donald, he yelled. Let's go to the movies!, 2008
      John Byrne RSA, Come Donald, he yelled. Let's go to the movies!, 2008
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  • VIEW OUR CURRENT EXHIBITION

    JOHN BYRNE: IN THE STUDIO

  

6 Dundas Street

Edinburgh EH3 6HZ

+44(0) 131 557 4050  

art@thefineartsociety.com

Open Tuesday to Friday 10 - 6pm, Saturday 11 - 2pm

Mondays by appointment only

 

This site contains images of work protected by copyright. We do not consent to reproduction or use of any images without our consent including for the purposes of AI training.

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