ONE of Scotland’s best known artists and playwrights has revealed a dreamlike new collection of paintings and his whole-hearted backing for his home town to become UK City of Culture in 2021.
John Byrne, writer of The Slab Boys and Tutti Frutti, who has a new collection of paintings on show at the Fine Art Society in Edinburgh, said he is fully behind the town’s cultural bid.
The artist, 76, opened the show, which runs at the gallery until December 23, also offered his take on the recent Brexit vote and US election.
Byrne, who grew up in Ferguslie Park area of the town, said he fully backs Paisley’s bid.
He said: “Paisley is a remarkable place. I hope to be involved and I support the bid. I support it wholeheartedly. I thank Ferguslie Park every day of my life for providing me all the information I ever needed about life, it was the best place I have ever been.
“It was happy circumstance we ended up there [as a family], the language, the life, everything. I couldn’t have got a better education.”
Byrne’s new paintings feature haunted and tumultuous dramatic scenes, notably with moonlit and crepuscular settings.
However, he said paintings such as Twixt The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea, which depicts the Devil aflame in a dark scene, were not inspired by the turbulent news of 2016.
“I could not care less about politics. Politics is a guise adopted by crooks, criminals, bum-bags – but they are not all like that,”
he said.
“I am vaguely interested in Brexit and Donald Trump. The Brexit thing came as a surprise, but Donald Trump less so, because it was him, it was inevitable in a way, because it is a great story, it is like a Hollywood movie, a comedy.
“You couldn’t make it up, as they say. It’s not a bad thing: he is part idiot and part genius, Donald Trump. I don’t mean he is admirable, but he is not an evil murderer, he is not evil.”
Byrne said Mr Trump was the kind of person the “upper middle class despise”, and while using a profane term to describe part of his character, noted “he has a side of him which is with the workers.”
He added: “He does not set himself up as a plaster Saint, but he might get something done. He is President-elect, and he has never been in politics in his life. It’s like a movie.
“The land that deserves it is the land that makes great movies. And that has happened in real life.”
Byrne is showing 15 new works at The Fine Art Society and several have already been sold from the collection, which is entitled Moonshine. They have been priced between £8,000 and £38,000.
He has completed a new play, called Tennis Elbow, which he describes as “the distaff side of Writer’s Cramp”, an older work by Byrne first staged in 1977 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
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