'We're not just messing about. We're taking on the world!' Bellany famously declared as a young man. His has been an eventful life. Indeed in 1988 alone, the year of his first solo exhibition with Beaux Arts in Bath, John Bellany was part of group exhibitions in Madrid, the Royal College of Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. He had other one-man shows in New York and Edinburgh, and was elected a fellow of Trinity Hall in Cambridge. This was also the year of his life-saving liver transplant at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge.

Since then Bellany's work has been shown in galleries all over the world, from New York to Sydney via Berlin, Copenhagen, Dublin and Amsterdam. His work is held in public collections in New York, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and in Britain, in the British Museum, the Royal College of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Tate Gallery, where he was shown with Max Beckmann and Stanley Spencer in 1999.

As he is in life, so he is in paint. John Bellany has chronicled the many peaks and troughs of his own existence in a way many of us would struggle to put into words. As Howard Jacobson puts it, 'it is one thing to tell the story of your life, and it is another to tell the story of what it is to live a life.'