Dream on | 14 March 2019

Art movements come and go but surrealism, in one form or another, has always been with us. Centuries before Freud’s scientific observation that the stuff of dreams will out, artists were painting it.

The English have never been much cop at surrealism — too buttoned up; the Celts are better. The Scottish painters Alan Davie and John Bellany, jointly celebrated in Newport Street Gallery’s latest show, Cradle of Magic, were both surrealists in different ways. Both attended Edinburgh College of Art — Davie in the late 1930s, Bellany in the early 1960s — and both came out fighting in a punchy style of painting combining expressionistic brushwork with strong colour. Davie, also a free jazzer, subscribed to the surrealist belief that automatism unlocks inspiration, so the faster you paint and the less you think the better. Arming himself with an arsenal of Celtic symbols, he attacked his canvases on the floor with bucketloads of paint. The younger Bellany was more old-fashioned. He consulted his imagination, drawing on a store of memories and — before his liver transplant of 1988 — a bucketload of booze.

Bellany’s career was shorter, but his art has worn better. Given a gallery to themselves Davie’s paintings get repetitive, like a showroom of carpets woven by a Mexican on peyote, then torn up and patched back together in the dark. True, they have creative energy and a signature style, but what do all the primordial insignia — the diamonds, horseshoes, chevrons, wheels, boomerangs, snakes and squiggles — signify? I liked the less congested canvases such as ‘Dolly Scent’ (1962), which look like the work of a talented graffitist, though I’m not convinced they’re more than a posh form of tagging. As Bellany said of his own painting: ‘The imagery always comes, but it’s whether you make it meaningful.