John Byrne Prints

Born in Paisley, Renfrewshire, John Byrne was one of the most inventive and contrary artists working in modern Scotland. Both stylistically and in terms of subject matter his work fizzes off in all directions, always however underpinned by technical mastery. As his friend Robbie Coltrane wrote in 2000 of Byrne's sketches: 'if I could draw like that I would give up everything else in my life'.

 

John’s formal life as an artist began aged 18 when he entered Glasgow School of Art. His mother said he started drawing in his pram. A year before entering the art school, he started at A. F. Stoddart & Co in Paisley - a “Technicolour hell hole” - as a “slab boy”. Much of what was to come, visually and literally, drew on what John observed there. From the early 1970s John diversified into writing, designing and directing stage and screen productions. In the decades that followed an extensive iconography unfolded amounting, in some cases, to a kind of pictorial autobiography. These pictures often referenced filmic and theatrical worlds, their backdrops lit like stage-sets. Nocturnal themes abounded: moonlit woods; the streets of 1950s Paisley; the self-examining artist, alone and wreathed in cigarette smoke. In a finely balanced act, he pulled together the macabre and humour.