John Byrne – 6 January 1940 - 30 November 2023
“I was brought up in Ferguslie Park,” painter, playwright and all round polymath John Byrne told Scottish Art News in 2014 of the Paisley housing estate he grew up in. “And I remember thanking God when we moved there, because I knew then that I had all the things I needed for whatever it was that I wanted to do.”
Ferguslie Park was never far away in everything that followed, right up
to Byrne’s death aged 83 following a long and maverick career that saw him renowned as an artist of vigorous imagination, be it as a painter, playwright or stage set designer.
As the 2022 retrospective at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum – John Byrne: A Big Adventure - showed, Byrne’s output was a vast and deeply personal affair. The exhibition was also recognition for an artist whose first experience of Kelvingrove came as a child, when he saw works by Titian and Salvador Dali's ‘Christ of Saint John of the Cross’ for the first time. Byrne’s early artistic education also came from the part works of the great masters serialised in the Daily Express, which he lapped up, and spent hours in his local library.
After leaving St Mirin’s Academy in Paisley, Byrne worked at Stoddart’s carpet factory, where he mixed paint before finally escaping to Glasgow School of Art. Byrne channelled his experience at Stoddart’s into his most famous play, The Slab Boys (1978). First seen at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, the play spun a tragicomic yarn about Phil and Spanky, a couple of 1950s Paisley teddy boys with ideas above their station. Desperate to get away from the carpet factory, art school or rock stardom was their aim.
Byrne’s 2014 painting, ‘Dead End’, which gave the title to an exhibition of new works at the Fine Art Society in Edinburgh, depicted two teddy boys standing in front of a cinema showing Dead End, a Broadway stage play made into a 1937 film starring Humphrey Bogart and the Dead End Kids. The latter was Hollywood’s version of a teenage street gang that appeared in numerous films for the next two decades, latterly as The Bowery Boys. Growing up in 1950s Paisley with his own set of dead end kids, those on screen, Byrne said, were their heroes.
After graduating from GSA, Byrne returned to Stoddart’s as a designer. He had his first exhibition in 1962 at Blytheswood Square Gallery in Glasgow. After his paintings were rejected by other institutions, Byrne’s first London success was contrived in 1967 at the Portal Gallery, after he claimed the paintings he submitted as ‘Patrick’ were by his father, a self-taught naïve painter. Byrne had the idea after reading a piece on self taught artists in a Sunday newspaper colour supplement.
“You needed a hook,” Byrne told the List magazine in 2014. “Like if there was a murderer who'd come out of prison or something, their work would get attention.”
While he was rumbled pretty quickly, Byrne had made his mark. For his next show he was photographed by David Bailey for an article written by Marina Warner, who “took me round the corner and bought me a packet of fags. I was enthralled,” Byrne told The List. “It was very showbizzy. You met anybody and everybody.”
This included The Beatles, who commissioned Byrne to do the cover for their next album, then scheduled to be called A Doll’s House. After the band Family released Music in a Doll’s House (1968), the name and Byrne’s image were dropped in favour of Richard Hamilton’s design for what became best known as The White Album (1968). Byrne’s original image was eventually used for the compilation, The Beatles Ballads (1980).
Byrne also painted album sleeves for Donovan, and for The Humblebums and Stealer’s Wheel, both led by Byrne’s old St Mirin’s pal, Gerry Rafferty. Byrne provided cover images for Rafferty’s first four albums, including City to City (1978) and Night Owl (1979). What turned out to be Byrne’s final play, Underwood Lane (2022), was a rock and roll musical named after the street where Rafferty lived, and was written in tribute to him.
Byrne’s early stage designs included The Great Northern Welly Boot Show (1972), which helped make former Humblebum Billy Connolly a star; and the iconic portable pop-up book set for John McGrath’s seminal ceilidh play for 7:84, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1973).
In 1975, Byrne became the first living artist to exhibit at Glasgow’s Third Eye Centre. The exhibition wasn’t well received, and Byrne didn’t show his paintings for another sixteen years, moving into playwriting instead. When the Third Eye was being transformed into the Centre of Contemporary Arts, sketches by Byrne for a mural he had painted on a gable end in Partick were discovered dumped in a skip beside the venue.
A similar incident occurred in 2014, when it was discovered that one half of an eight-foot diptych of Billy Connolly, painted by Byrne in 1975 and on loan in perpetuity to Glasgow’s People’s Palace, had been lost. The diptych was to be shown at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh as part of Sitting Ducks (2014), a collection of fifty largely unseen works by Byrne drawn from mainly private collections. A more recent mural of Connolly, painted by Byrne in 2017, looks set to be hidden after Glasgow City Council approved the development of an eleven-storey student accommodation block next to the artwork.
Despite his early setbacks in the art world, Byrne’s theatre writing flourished. He also moved into television with Tutti Frutti (1987). The six-part drama series charted the travails of a past its sell by date Glasgow rock and roll band’s revival by way of the co-opting into the fold of the deceased lead singer ‘Big’ Jazza McGlone’s younger brother Danny. Danny was played by Robbie Coltrane, another Glasgow School of Art graduate, whose early acting success came in The Slab Boys. The first episode of Tutti Frutti featured a scene with Coltrane and Emma Thompson wandering through GSA, alma mater of both their characters.
Two other GSA graduates were Roberts Colquhoun and MacBryde, the Ayrshire born painters who became 1940s art stars. During their glory years, the boozy couple hung out with Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Soho’s boho set before their figurative paintings fell out of fashion and they crashed and burned their way to oblivion.
Byrne’s play, Colquhoun and MacBryde (1992, revised 2000), was a fictionalised account of the duo’s rise and fall. First presented with a cast of fourteen, subsequent revivals of the play in Dundee and Glasgow saw Byrne strip the play back to a two-man version, with the baroque sparring between the artists resembling a Beckettian sitcom. This came complete with facsimiles of Colquhoun and MacBryde’s work painted by Byrne.
In terms of Byrne’s playwriting, as actor Gavin Mitchell pointed out following his passing, Byrne didn’t so much write words as paint them. The flamboyant patois that resulted was drawn from pop culture slang, and delivered with an attitude and swagger set down by Elvis Presley, rock and roll, and the American films of Byrne’s youth.
This fed into his paintings, as well as the numerous character drawings that accompany his plays. As artworks, these are as stylish as Byrne himself, who effectively became his own canvas. This wasn’t just in his numerous self-portraits, but as something of a living artwork. Resplendent in dandified tweed, with his blue eyes twinkling and a gloriously tobacco-grizzled Paisley accent mumbling through his elaborately coiffed moustache, Byrne was the embodiment of old school bohemian cool. He would have fitted in well with Francis, Lucian and the two Roberts.
Byrne was a populist in the best sense of the word, whose seriousness as an artist was fused by playfulness and wit. Some of his portraits are now held permanently by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and retrospectives include John Byrne at 60, The Unsolved Artist (Paisley Museum and Art Gallery, 2000), and Ceci n’est pas one rétrospective (Fine Art Society, Edinburgh, 2022). In 2007, Byrne became a member of the Royal Scottish Academy. By that time he had quietly returned his MBE in protest at the Iraq War.
In 2013, the inseparable synergies between Byrne’s twin artistic outlets were channelled into a mural commissioned for the ceiling of the King’s Theatre, Edinburgh. Byrne called it All the World’s a Stage. In 2022, John Byrne: A Big Adventure showed the full expanse of his canon. The Peter Pan reference in the exhibition’s title probably wasn’t accidental. John Byrne retained a child-like sense of wonder to the end, creating art in everything he touched.
Byrne is survived by his wife, Jeanine Byrne, and his four children; John and Celie from his first marriage to Alice Simpson; and Xavier and Honor, from his relationship with Tilda Swinton.
Scottish Art News, December 2023
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