Bellamy artist
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RESEARCH INTERESTS
My research to date has focused primarily on the political culture of early modern England and on the cultural origins of the English Revolution. This work has included an array of publications on news, media, and the political public sphere, on popular politics and political agency, on the interplay between early modern politics, literature and visual culture, on poison and medicine, and on the scandalous images of early Stuart court favorites. I am currently completing a textbook for Oxford University Press on the history of the Britannic Isles from prehistory to 1715, which has spun off an essay project on the politics of mid- and late- seventeenth-century antiquarian interpretations of Stonehenge. I am also beginning a major new project on late medieval and early modern climate history, tentatively titled “Looking for the Little Ice Age”, while continuing to work on a small book that explores the history of song through a socio-cultural analysis of a late Stuart hanging ballad and its migrations through various English and American afterlives.
COURSES R Born at Port Seton in 1942 into a family of fishermen and boat builders and steeped in Calvinism as a child, his art is profoundly religious in its intimation of morality and recognition of evil; facts reinforced in 1967 by a traumatic visit to the remains of the Buchenwald concentration camp. But Bellany’s life voyage has proved every bit as perilous as the sea voyages of his ancestors. Throughout his career he has painted elemental allegories encompassing the complexities of the human condition and anchored in the rich poetry of the sea; but after moving to London in 1965 to study at the Royal College of Art, his vision and iconography became broader. In the seventies when his personal life was in turmoil, he embarked on a near-fatal journey of self-destruction, reflected in the angst-ridden images in his paintings of the period. Bellany’s life voyage has proved every bit as perilous as the sea voyages of his ancestors. In the nineteen-eighties he successfully underwent a liver transplant which inspired a remarkable series of pictures started, to the ast Helen Bellany, twice married to the artist John Bellany, recalls their lives together in Scotland, London, and Italy.One of the most enigmatic British artists, his work described by the Guardian as ‘at once realist, expressionist and surrealist’, this book tells how John Bellany rose from rebellious art student to worldwide recognition.•
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Restless Wave by Helen Bellany
Inspired by the sea and the Scottish fishing community he was born into, he began his lifelong visionary journey exploring the human condition.
The Restless Wave is also an account of the human cost inherent in creating great art, John’s long struggle against alcoholism which resulted in acute liver failure, the organ transplant that saved him, and his gradual recovery and renaissance are described in unflinching detail.
The Restless Wave reflects the mystery, poetry and passion that was at the core of the inner life John and Helen shared.
The couple had great friendships with such fellow artists as David Bowie, and John painted such internationally known figures as Billy Connolly, Sean Connery and Peter Maxwell Dav
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