Connolly draws attention to some complex emotions

The French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was also a violin player. He was less well known as a musician: the French phrase violin d’Ingres means having a second string to one’s bow.

The same might be said of Billy Connolly. A talented comedian and actor, he has for some years turned his hand to visual art, partly as a result of his Parkinson’s disease.

I was supposed to meet him to discuss his work, but the razzamatazz of celebrity had overwhelmed the small venue where his ink-and-line drawings were being shown and I bowed out, sensing Connolly’s frailty and, frankly, turned off by the atmosphere of hushed sycophancy. Sometimes, talking to any artist can skew one’s opinion of their work. Perhaps even more so when fame seems to create all sorts of barriers to true communication.

Connolly’s art poses a conundrum for the critic. How is it to be assessed? With the same criteria as those applied to a professional artist with years of training and experience? Clearly, that’s not a level playing field.

There are some big claims made for Connolly’s art, by the gallery itself: “. . . his process mirrors that of the Surrealist automatism . . . pioneered by André Masson and practised by Miró, Dalí, Arp and Breton”.

It’s difficult to believe in automatism — creating art without conscious thought — when we know more about how the mind works than a century ago. There’s always intent and a starting point. Some of these drawings are poignant, others funny and some enigmatic. Themes of childhood, games, reminiscences and relationships (parent and child) seem to run through these works, some of which are modest and vague, while others are more cutting and visceral.

Most begin with an outline of a figure, or figures, filled in by a sometimes complex interweave of lines. They are far from simple but neither are they artistically advanced.

It would be wrong to think of such images as Free Flight (a figure borne aloft by balloons) or Hang Glider (a cross-legged figure with butterfly wings) as autobiographical but for a person with such a public profile it’s difficult not to search for parallels.

Like everyone, Connolly has complex emotions, some revealed in the drawings in a way that comedy does not allow. He’s clearly a man of great gifts and had he pursued the career of visual artist, like his friend John Byrne, from an earlier age, who knows where it might have led. At the moment, however, this work is embryonic but full of the promise of richer development.

Until November 30