John Byrne – Sitting Ducks

Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, June 14-October 19

It was a chance meeting with an Edinburgh councillor on Leith Walk that
eventually led to Sitting Ducks, painter and playwright John Byrne's
show of rarely seen work that opens at the Scottish National Portrait
Gallery this month before touring to Inverness. Having suggested to
Byrne that it was about time he had a major show in the capital, the
councillor wrote to the National Galleries of Scotland, who agreed, and
the wheels were duly set in motion for the exhibition of some fifty-odd
works drawn mainly from private collections dating as far back as the
1960s, many of which have never been seen publicly before.

“It was just stuff I remembered that people had bought,” Byrne muses,
“so I made a list. A lot of it is stuff I've not seen since I did it,
drawings of my children, things like that.”

There are self-portraits too, including one from the early 1970s “which
can be dated from the fact that I'm wearing bell-bottomed jeans.”

Not everything on show will be complete, however, including an
eight-foot diptych of Billy Connolly, which has been on loan “in
perpuity” to the People's Palace in Glasgow, where only one half of the
painting could be found. Such a loss sits with the recent rediscovery
of sketches  for a mural Byrne painted on a gable end in Partick in the
1970s, which were found in a skip next to the old Third Eye Centre.

“I think they'll be a bit more careful at the National Gallery,” Byrne
says.

A new publication will accompany Sitting Ducks, along with assorted
merchandise. Byrne twinkles at the prospect.

“They put your face on a plate or a tie or something,” he chuckles.
“Which I'm not averse to at all.”

The List, June 2014