A Life in Line and Colour
As a student at The Glasgow School of Art in the early 1950s, Sandy Goudie was boisterous, opinionated and cheerfully confrontational. But he was not a rebel. Even from this early stage he had evolved an idea of what it meant to be an artist that was grounded upon tradition. He relished the lessons which were given to him by tutors, including David Donaldson, and his artistic heroes were figures like Manet, Velázquez and Van Dyck. The rest of his life would be a performance, channelling the spirit of these great masters, pushing himself creatively and technically, aspiring to reach the heights of their genius. Even at this early stage, art for young Goudie was a celebration, an opportunity to create a vision of the world that was rich in sensuousness and painterly beauty. It was the approach he brought to painting portraits, a genre he specialised in after graduating from art school. Working in a small studio in Paisley and then Johnstone, dad would transform his subjects. When confronted with a sober suited professor or provost, he would flamboyantly describe their ceremonial robes, enhancing their appearance with carefully placed highlights, endowing them with the aura of a royal courtier. He loved the dramatic possibilities of paint. In 1962, my father’s life was transformed when he met and married a young French girl from Brittany, Marie-Renée Dorval. From this point onwards he would spend part of each year in France, using the home of his in-laws as
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both a studio and as a kind of living theatre of inspiration. Brittany, in 1962, was a country preserved in aspic – a deeply religious culture, where traditional costume and head-dresses were still worn every day. It was a landscape and an agricultural economy that had hardly changed since the years when artists like Paul Gauguin first visited. This was just the kind of time-machine my father needed; a rural subject in which he could embed himself, just as the 19th century Glasgow Boys had done in Cockburnspath, on the east coast of Scotland. Each summer, dad sketched the ploughmen, the potato pickers, the fish gutters and trawlermen. And just as he elevated the dour dignitaries that came to sit for their portraits in Scotland, so he now ennobled the fieldworkers of Brittany – etching their dignified profiles into his sketchbooks, onto canvas and eventually modelling them in clay. For artists like Gauguin and Paul Sérusier, the strong light, strong shadows and strong colours of Brittany had been transformative. They were inspired to experiment with compositions incorporating areas of bold, flat pigment – to create images that seemed ever so slightly unhitched from reality. And in the 70s and 80s, as my father grew more familiar with his new Breton subject and with the work of the artists who had preceded him, so he began to indulge the colourist lurking inside of him. Increasingly his impressions of the land and the sea became vivid, joyous; a graphic patchwork of form and colour. Brittany was my father’s second
