2019
Watercolour on paper
The artist’s book, ‘The Restless Wave: My Two Lives with John Bellany‘ is a significant contribution to an oeuvre of accounts of a woman’s support for the life and work of a renowned intellectual or artist and all its hard costs that includes those of Valda Grieve (through letters to Hugh MacDiarmid), Françoise Gilot and Coretta Scott King to name a few.
Helen Bellany’s book also piques an interest in the author’s own artwork. I’m guessing I’m not the only reader who wondered, on reading about Helen Bellany’s days at Edinburgh College of Art with John Bellany and Alexander Moffat, what happened to her own work? What does she create and is she still making her own art? Helen Bellany cleared a space for herself with this important book and within that space, now in the public domain, I was bold enough to ask whether I might show some of her own artworks. Her gracious and generous response resulted in her paintings being shown here for the very first time since her art college days.
‘Fifty years is a long time but that’s how long the gap had been before I started to draw again. More than fifty years. … Had I been intimidated by the power of John’s work? Most definitely. Did I resent this? Most definitely not.’ – Helen Bellany (read her full statement, ‘Returning to Painting,’ in Artists tab).
Book available direct from Sandstone Press or from your local independent bookseller.
