John Byrne - an appreciation of a multi-talented cultural icon

Born into a working-class, Catholic family in Paisley in 1940, the young John Patrick Byrne was an extremely talented autodidact, both with brush and pen. So much so that he was able to graduate from what he called the “Technicolor hell hole” of AF Stoddard & Co. in Paisley (where, famously, he worked as an underpaid and under-valued “slab boy”, mixing the colours for the carpets that the factory produced) to a place at the Glasgow School of Art.

At art school Byrne gained a tremendous sense of art history and of the many aesthetic movements to which it had given rise. Such was his immense skill that Byrne mastered every artistic style that he turned his hand to.

This fact was made abundantly clear in the major (and overdue) retrospective of his visual art, titled John Patrick Byrne: A Big Adventure, which was held at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow earlier this year. Of course, there were paintings in the colourful, hyper-real style that many people consider to be Byrne’s signature visual aesthetic.

John Byrne was one of Scotland's great artists

These included pictures of the 1950s and 1960s youth who shared Byrne’s fascination with the music and fashions of American rock ‘n’ roll, blues and jazz. They encompassed, too, album covers for his fellow “Paisley Buddie” (and boyhood family friend) Gerry Rafferty and portraits of Byrne’s pal Billy Connolly.

However, that wonderful exhibition proved, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Byrne had no one signature style. Rather, he painted, drew, printed and, on occasion, sculpted in an extraordinary range of aesthetics.

His paintings of his wife, the theatre lighting designer Jeanine Byrne, and his former spouse, the actor and filmmaker Tilda Swinton, are imbued with similar warmth and affection, but the distinctiveness of the styles suggests they were painted by different artists. Byrne’s amazing diversity of artistic styles was also reflected in his (often very humorous) array of self-portraits (including a cubist picture of him puffing on a cigarette that one could swear had been painted by Picasso himself).

The humour, colour and diversity of Byrne’s visual art has probably led to him being undervalued in certain circles. However, as well as being technically brilliant, he was a thoughtful, humane, often deep and metaphorical, sometimes political painter, and he should be remembered as one of the finest visual artists Scotland has ever produced.

Byrne was known for the diversity of his artistic style

Outstanding as his paintings and drawings are, it is, surely, Byrne’s work as a dramatist that brought him the greatest public acclaim. The smash hit TV series Tutti Frutti (made by BBC Scotland and released in 1987), for which Byrne wrote the screenplays, is possibly his most celebrated work.

Named after the song by Little Richard, rooted in Byrne’s love of rock ‘n’ roll, this multiple award-winning comedy about the travails of touring Scottish band The Majestics is credited with launching the careers of Robbie Coltrane and Emma Thompson. The massive success of Tutti Frutti (pictured) was followed in 1990 by the acclaimed slice of Glasgow life drama Your Cheatin’ Heart, which starred Tilda Swinton and John Gordon-Sinclair.

As a playwright, Byrne exhibited the same humour and human empathy that was so evident in his screen work and visual art. His articulation of Scottish working-class modes of speech was so particular to him, so distinctively “Byrne dialogue” that playwright David Greig termed it an “idiolect”; that is to say that Byrne’s characters speak in terms that belong simultaneously to both the writer’s own dramatic idiom and to Scottish dialect.

We find this in his excellent play Colquhoun and MacBryde (1992), which is a sympathetic portrayal of the acclaimed Scottish painters who, as gay lovers in the 1940s and 1950s, lived and worked in a society that criminalised their very existence. The Byrne idiolect is at play marvellously in his stage adaptation of Tutti Frutti (for the then new National Theatre of Scotland in 2006) and, his most celebrated works for the stage, The Slab Boys Trilogy.

Premiering at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh between 1978 and 1982 these three plays (The Slab Boys, Cuttin’ a Rug and Still Life) offer a hilarious, poignant and insightful account of the lives of slab boys Phil and Spanky and the great panoply of characters who cross their paths. So embedded is the trilogy in the fabric of Scottish theatre that the plays have enjoyed numerous revivals, including 40th anniversary stagings of all three at the Traverse in 2003.

I had the great privilege and pleasure of interviewing Byrne on the stage of the Ramshorn Theatre in Glasgow in 2010, on the occasion of Strathclyde Theatre Group’s production of The Slab Boys. It was a measure of Byrne’s generosity that he was so supportive of the work of what was, in essence, an amateur company.

His personal warmth and charm were apparent, both on-stage and off. Indeed, I was fortunate to experience Byrne’s instinctive interest in and solidarity with others on every subsequent occasion on which I met him.

Although to meet him was, however confidently one had stepped out the front door, to feel entirely under-dressed. Byrne had believed in the importance of personal style since his first encounters with slicked back hair and rockabilly platform shoes in the 1950s. Whether he was wearing a frock coat and perfectly matching trousers (typically with an ornately designed scarf) or a three-piece tweed suit, Byrne was always the best dressed man in the room.

Byrne was as outrageously talented in paint and ink as he was in language. His work is, by turns, vivid, poetic, hilarious and heart-breakingly sad.

We have lost an artist who was, simultaneously, quintessentially Scottish, distinctively individual and powerfully universal. He was, quite simply, one of the greats of Scottish culture.