Liverpool, England ? As a youth, Paul McCartney would skip school with fellow Beatle John Lennon and the two would visit a local art gallery. McCartney has returned to the same gallery for the first comprehensive exhibition of his art.

The show of some 70 paintings by McCartney, dating from 1987 to 2001, opens today at the Walker Art Gallery and runs through Aug. 1 in the singer-songwriter’s home town.

“I used to come here as a schoolboy,” McCartney said. “If I had said to John then, ‘I’m going to have an exhibition here one day,’ I think I know what he would have said. I’ll leave it to your imagination.”

McCartney’s brightly colored and slapdash paintings are shown with six sculptures made from driftwood. None of the works, taken from his homes in Britain and the United States, is up for sale.

His canvases depict landscapes, shells, flowers, people with often wild faces and Celtic mythology McCartney has Irish roots. Most of the pictures are sunny but several are dark and mysterious. One, “Bowie Spewing,” shows fellow pop icon David Bowie being sick.

Among the abstract paintings is a large red heart with the figure of a female nude scratched on the surface titled “Big Heart, 1999.” It is one of the few works in the show painted by McCartney since meeting his fiancee, Heather Mills, after the death of his wife, Linda.

“The Kiss,” shows McCartney kissing Linda and “Hottest Linda,” depicts his late wife sunbathing.

McCartney won an art prize for a drawing of a church when he was 11, but he only began painting seriously 20 years ago. The exhibition will only be shown in Liverpool, where all four Beatles were born, grew up and came together as a band.