Love and Liberty

The Poetry fo Robert Burns : Drawings by Peter Bevan

Compass Gallery, West Regent Street, Glasgow

24th January – 18th February 2009

As someone who survived a typically English education, I knew nothing of Robert Burns until 1973 when I came to live and work in Scotland. Even then, it was more than ten years later, after being asked to make some drawings based on his work, that I first personally, read any of his poems.

Reading the “Complete Works” was indeed a revelation in terms of the enormous range of ideas and issues to which Burns refers over the course of his life, which in his early pecuniary and parochial circumstances, could only result from a determined and life-long self-education through books, pamphlets, newspapers and (despite his avuncular preference for the “lower classes”), the cultivation of “cultured” acquaintances. These issues include, an anti-Calvinistic and liberal attitude to religion, the desperate plight of the poor and hypocrisy of the upper classes; contemporary British politics and the “English” monarchy, the importance of the French Revolution and Independence of the American Colonies, and the inequities of Slavery.

Most of his poems and songs however, draw directly from personal experience and of course many are concerned with the passion and love for the female sex, whether requited or not. But poems also reveal the depths of Burn’s intermittent financial and emotional depressions as well as the heights of artistic and social success. However, it is an irrepressible humour, which resonates throughout the varied subjects of the poems, whether devilish or benign, satirical, bawdy or worse, or simply comical. I’m sure he would have been and maybe was a great stand up comic.

It is important to me that all of these aspects of Burns work are represented in my drawings, because, I feel they have contemporary resonance. But also, to acknowledge what a revelation they were to me and hopefully, may be, to viewers unfamiliar with the great breadth of his passionate response to life, in all its aspects.