John Bellany, R.A.

John McEwan, John Bellany, Edinburgh, 1994, illustrated, p.113.

The threes canvases have not been lined. All three panels appear to be in excellent original condition. There are a few very minor specks of surface dirt UV light inspection reveals no evidence of any retouching or restoration. All three canvases are not framed.
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Valhalla is a monumental work, not just in its impressive scale but also in the breadth of its expressionist vision. Bellany’s unique imaginings were in part fuelled by alcohol, his drink of choice being rum, the seaman’s grog. This addiction led to serious liver failure and a complicated transplant and this near death experience served to reinforce to Bellany a consciousness of the fragility of life. An awareness of human mortality was also instilled in the artist from a young age. The severe influence of Calvinism coupled with first-hand experience of tragic losses at sea meant that Bellany’s imagination would always be possessed by death. Indeed, in an interview with the BBC in 1974 Bellany told the interviewer that ‘death is always just around the corner.’ Considering the traumatic illness he would encounter later in life this was a prophetic statement. The title of the present work is itself a direct reference to death; in Nordic mythology Valhalla is where fallen warriors spent the afterlife. Bellany’s oeuvre is imbued throughout with a sense of mythology and visual symbolism and Alan Davie, an artist true to his Celtic roots, described Bellany as ‘a painter of Nordic mystical power’ (John McEwen, John Bellany, Edinburgh, 1994, p.17). Clearly Bellany’s Scottish heritage and an awareness of Norse and Celtic mythology greatly influenced his artistic imagination.

In the forward to John McEwen’s biography of Bellany John Russell remarks that there ‘was a sheer abundance of material in each painting. It was as if the ideas were spilling out all over, the way (on a good day) fish spill out of the nets’ (ibid, p.11). Indeed, Valhalla is a work that carries more meanings than can possibly be deciphered at any one time and the influences behind these messages are myriad. The work contains many of the recurrent features of Bellany’s painting. There are numerous unidentifiable and fantastical creatures, bare breasted women presented as temptresses, there are constant references to religion, death stalks the picture throughout and in the centre of the whole composition there is a distorted clock, a reminder of time’s relentless march. Much like one of his artistic heroes Edvard Munch, whose late work Between the Clock and the Bed (1945) is burdened by the transience of life, Bellany found the unstoppable ticking of the clock almost impossible to ignore. Valhalla stands as one of the artist's most impressive works encompassing as it does almost the entirety of Bellany’s artistic reverie and gives us, the viewer, an indication of the forces and currents that were in motion within.