John BellanyMy Grandmother c.1967

John Bellany was born in the Scottish fishing community of Port Seton, north of Edinburgh. During the war years, while his fisherman father was away on active service, his mother spent protracted periods with her parents, Mr and Mrs Sonnie Maltman - also fishing folk, in the Berwickshire harbour town of Eyemouth. The years spent with his maternal grandparents were to have a formative effect on Bellany’s life. At his grandparents’ house in Eyemouth he was haunted by skulls on the seventeenth century gravestones in the old cemetery behind their street… (read more)