Sir Billy Connolly's two big anniversaries: his 80th birthday and ten years with Castle Fine Art!

Artistic beginnings...

Billy’s career as an artist began on a wet day whilst he was on tour in Canada. Bored, he picked up paper and pens in a Montreal art store after he’d tired of looking at the animals in the window of a local pet shop. “I’d never drawn in my life until this point, but I just started drawing weird islands and carried on drawing. I asked my wife (the psychologist, writer and performer Dr Pamela Stephenson-Connolly) to tell me if they were getting better and she said ‘definitely’.”

So his manager sent Billy’s drawings in his now trademark style of stripey elements drawn with a fine, black pen, to us at Castle Fine Art. We subsequently his hugely popular Born on a Rainy Day collection in 2012, and the rest is history.

His initial black-and-white drawings, which included works such as ‘Scottish Lion (Extinct)’, ‘Pink Tie and Hanky’ and ‘Blue Angel’, have now developed into a witty, vibrant and colourful collection of limited edition artworks, from giclées to sculptures, to a massive sculpture of his work showing a Glasgow welder at work, ‘And on Monday, God Made the World’.

And now...

Billy is now working on new pieces at his Florida home but came to the UK earlier this year to launch new works from his Born on A Rainy Day collection, much to the delight of collectors who were invited to meet him at  Castle Fine Art galleries.

He’s still delighted at the response to his work. “The fact that other people like it and want to live with it in their homes blows me sideways. To have somebody who wants a part of your mind in their life - I thought my wife had been the only one to fall for that, but it turns out that she's not alone,” he says.

To celebrate his birthday, earlier this month we released 'Free Flight Variations', a series of 365 prints of a man with colourful balloons, where every one is as original as Billy himself.

Billy is a musician, comedian and actor, and we at Castle Fine Art are delighted that he now brings all of those experiences into his art, which we are incredibly proud to represent. Collectors tell us how much pleasure and fun Billy’s pieces bring into their lives, and we wish him a very happy birthday and many more years of bringing his unique art into our homes.