While colour lights up your face...
Last week I mentioned that I accompanied
As we browsed this year's very high standard of work my eyes settled on the very familar visage in the painting above. "Oh that's a John Bellany," observed George.
And indeed it is. Entitled David Bowie the painting is one of five of Bellany's oils in the exhibition and it's yours for a mere £80,000.
Bowie himself is a keen collector of Bellany's work and a good friend of the painter, as hinted at in this excerpt from a
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He would blush, big-style, almost half a century later when Bowie revealed that his home in Switzerland displayed his favourite Bellany next to a Tintoretto. "He told me he thought my work stood up very well in such company. Then his wee secretary from Aberdeen piped up and said she preferred it to the Tintoretto. These kind of things make your head bounce off the walls."
Among his collectors across the oceans from Port Seton, there are many who love their Bellanys and that?s as far as appreciation goes. Some might be curious enough to look up the village in an atlas or on the internet, but Bowie has delved deeper.
"He comes to Port Seton a lot. He told me he goes with a ?reverent feeling? to try and find out what might have inspired the paintings in his collection. One time he was staying at the Caley Hotel in Edinburgh and he came to our flat for dinner. "I asked him, ?Well, David, what have you been up to the day?? He said: ?I?ve been down to Port Seton again and talk about co-incidence! Right next door to your old house, 8 Gosford Road, is one called ?Dar es Salaam?. The funny thing is I?ve just fallen in love with a girl from Dar es Salaam and you?ll meet her next time I?m here.?" This, of course, was Iman, now Bowie?s supermodel wife.
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If John's Bowie painting has whetted your appetitie for more, keep an eye out for bellany.com which is currently under construction and will be packed with tons of stuff to interest you.
FOOT NOTE: The first person to e-mail me with the correct reason why I used the lyric quotation in aforementioned George Underwood news story was johnnie_7. "The paintings are all your own..." is a line from Song For Bob Dylan, and whether there's any truth in the theory that David actually wrote the song for George or not, it is a fact that George took the lead vocal when the song was performed for John Peel's In Concert programme in June 1971.