Bellany Helen - RESTLESS WAVE: my two lives with john bellany

Theres a painting which has hung in the General Assembly Room at the Royal Academy in London for the past two years which haunts me every time I see it. It is rendered in oil on board and shows a face full of life and character staring off to the right and into the distance from beneath a large brimmed black hat. Behind are high clouds and a handful of soaring seagulls distantly visible. The face itself is slightly smaller than life-size but feels larger, more monumental. It is framed by hair, sideburns into whiskers into a voluminous beard but one which is emphatically cropped along the bottom giving the image a harder edge than one might expect, which in turn is echoed by the way the shoulders and arms are organised, so that the torso becomes almost but not quite a perfect square. In addition, the figure is cropped just below the rib-cage by a gilded frame surrounded by a green mount except it is all painted as if to suggest a window or mirror, framed within a frame, a painting as a portal into another world.

The painting is, of course, a self-portrait by John Bellany. It was made in 1966 sometime towards the end of his first year in London as a post-graduate student at the Royal College of Art. He was either just or not quite 24 years old and yet the painting suggests a man of talent and vision who has lived a bit, indeed considerably more than one score year and four. His face reads, as the painter Chuck Close once put it of a Rembrandt self-portrait, like a road map of human experience and reminds me of that wonderful story told of Kokoschka, one of Johns many artist heroes. Apparently, on seeing a portrait the Viennese master had made, a particular sitter complained that it looks nothing like me. It will in time came the reply.

I cant know for certain that the young John Bellany was necessarily envisaging his older self but it seems a distinct possibility. He was immensely self-aware as an artist and haunted by human mortality. His Calvinist upbringing, alluded to by the crucifix than hangs around his neck in the self-portrait, contributed to this as did the precarious existence of the fishermen in the community he grew up in at Port Seton. But his art seemed to be a way both of reflecting on the inevitability of death and fronting up to it.

I only got to know John in the last twenty years of his life. I say only because it feels too short. It was, however, a privilege and a pleasure; an inspiration and an education. We met through broadcasting at which he was a natural. The man you heard ruminating on Picasso or Goya on Radio 4 was no different to the man he was on the street, in the studio, in the pub. Hed stopped drinking by that time but seemed to love the ambience of bars where we would sit and talk about the thing he loved most painting. He knew I was callow and had little clue about the deeper issues of painterly processes and traditions, but he also knew I was curious and occasionally cocky and he somehow managed to imbue me with a sense of what mattered as well as gently challenging my taste and understanding. I remember having an argument about a particular contemporary painter and he finally cut across me and said, lifes too short to bother with mediocrity Tim. Find what you really like and spend time really looking.

The most memorable time I spent with John was in Amsterdam in early December 1991. We had gone there to see the great Rembrandt exhibition at the Rijksmuseum and recorded a walk through the galleries for Radio 4s then daily arts programme Kaleidoscope. I managed to find a copy of the programme recently and although the holy grail would be the unedited version of our conversation well over an hour of conversation which the producer Jerome Weatherald still hopes to find one day the seven minute broadcast version still brings me out in Bellany/Rembrandt inspired goosebumps.

Face to face with Rembrandts paintings and drawings and etchings, John was overwhelmed and overwhelmingly brilliant. Much is made of his affinities with Beckman and also with German and Austrian Expressionism, justifiably so, but he seemed even more engaged with the great European tradition and came to life in a way that Ive rarely encountered with anyone standing in an art museum or gallery, before or since. He was not interested in the sub-text of the exhibition, namely which works were by the master and which by the studio, as recently determined by the Rembrandt Research Project. He was interested in his perception of the master and his visible, tangible achievements. Was the very young Rembrandt supremely talented or just competent I remember asking him? He looked shocked. God no this is no plodder trying to get his A-levels he said, rather wilfully overstating my implied criticism, this is a child prodigy... an artist whose stupendous eye and touch conveys the deepest sense of humanity and almost brings a tear to my eye. He went on to speak of the tenderness and love with which the Dutch master depicted his ailing son Titus. He spoke of the magnificence of the easy bits... he never eases off... every inch of the painting matters, every inch gels.

The great, late Rembrandt self-portrait which usually hangs at Kenwood House became my favourite painting from that day after John eulogised its compassion and humanity. I asked him, impossibly but necessarily for our listeners, to try and summarise Rembrandts genius. Its not about words, he said, you have to look and absorb, think and feel. That is what he is asking us to do. Finally, pausing for breath and looking again, John concluded: I feel so humbled ... like a pygmy looking at these things... yet I also feel uplifted and inspired. It just makes me want to rush back to the studio and paint my heart out.