en famille

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 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

Drummer Boy, c.1985 Private collection

Lachlan Leaning on Chair, c.1985 Private collection

art school. It had a deep impact on the style of painting he pursued on returning to his studio in Glasgow every autumn.

By the mid-1970s my parents had swapped a cottage in Johnstone for a building more suited to dad’s flamboyant artistic ambitions, and indeed his ego. The Victorian Palazzo where I grew up and where my father had his studio was a huge and fabulously ornamented stage set. Beneath the vaulted glass ceiling, gilded cornicing and cantilevered galleries, dad played the starring role. He was a tartan-suited virtuoso, painting Dukes and Duchesses one day and sumptuous still lifes the next. In the hallway, a stereo poured out a constant soundtrack of classical music and in the kitchen my mother laboured to prepare platters of lobsters, pheasants and porcine cuts and carcasses. These were ferried into the studio where my dad would ignore the mouldering stench of decay that inevitably set in after a few days, and create painted representations of baroque abundance.

Alexander Goudie, along with his peers and contemporaries, David Donaldson, Jimmy Robertson, John Cunningham, Duncan Shanks and John Byrne were trained at art school to understand the alchemy of paint. They studied the properties of pigments and mediums, the tension between line and colour, the methods of modelling form and transferring your lived experience onto canvas. In the second half of the 20th century, however, with the emergence of conceptual art, these principles of painterliness, craftsmanship and technique came to be viewed with suspicion. The simple act of painting landscapes, portraits or still lifes was condemned by some critics as outmoded. My father was unrepentant – and in any case he didn’t know any other way to be an artist.

Living at Arnewood House was rather like being part of my father’s circus troupe. We were all The Goudie family at home, c.1981

expected to perform in some way, to take our place on the podium in the studio and sit for hours as he painted our portraits. The paintings themselves were the result of sustained scrutiny. Dad was always observing us as we went, unsuspectingly, about our daily lives. Every so often he would catch us in a pose that sparked an idea for a portrait; Budoc playing the banjo, Gwen carrying a bunch of flowers, me blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. And that was that; Saturday mornings for the foreseeable future would be spent recreating that instant. My tenth birthday was strung out over weeks. For every portrait session I’d put on my paper hat and we’d light the candles on a slowly solidifying cake. Of course, I hated it then, but the paintings which we now have hanging in our homes are so full of his attention and care, it’s like he put a frame around his love for each of us and we get to share in that relationship every day.

My mother, of course, was the favourite muse. When I came home from school at lunch, she would often be cooking in her dressing gown and when I left for the afternoon, I knew she would return to being my father’s nude model. There, draped across a sofa or standing in the bay

En Famille, c.1975 Private collection

window, looking down from the third floor on an unsuspecting Cleveden Road, she would wait patiently as dad painted. A passerby glancing up might have got a voyeuristic shock. More often than not, however, it would be my father that they would catch a glimpse of. All day he would pace from window to window gathering the brushes and paints that were scattered across tables in the sun. And by force of habit, he would look up and study the Glasgow light as it shifted across the sandstone buildings opposite or filtered through the poplar trees.

Glasgow’s skyline fascinated my father. But when he eventually painted the portrait of his adoptive city, he refused to depict a vision of urban decay and squalor. In his eyes Glasgow was a Vienna of the North, a place of culture and architectural elegance. The Victorian splendour of Park Circus was no less ‘real’ than the sooty canyons and gutters of the Gorbals. It was the intellectual and aesthetic ambition of Glasgow that he chose to celebrate; a dear green place, Kelvingrove’s palace of art and the dreaming spires of the city’s medieval university. Alexander Goudie died in 2004. To his last breath he was an unreconstructed romantic, an egomaniac, an artist immersed in the tradition of painting. His was a life dedicated to colour and painterly flamboyance, an eye and a hand that documented his most valued experiences with unrivalled skill. I will always be his apprentice.

lachlan goudie

14. Nude by Lamplight, c.1975 chalk on paper, 49 x 62 cm

15. Seated Nude in Armchair, c.1975 bronze finished plaster, 28 h x 34 w x 34 d cm

16. Nude Seated on Couch, c.1975 bronze finished plaster, 39 h x 51 w x 33 d cm

Míle Fáilte Lachlan, c.1976 Private collection

Party Piece is a family portrait painted when my mother was, unbeknown to us, expecting our younger brother Lachlan – and our life as a family of four was about to be totally transformed.

Many weekends were taken up sitting for my father and not being able to go out and play with friends. I do remember the discomfort of wearing my ballet costume for hours on end and not being allowed to move. My mother was supreme in her patience and dedication, and Budoc was always the gentle sitter. We learnt very quickly the price of having to give up certain pleasures or weekend activities. And with my father there was no discussion. In one other family portrait, I remember having to bake a cake three times until my father was happy with the colour of the icing.

gwen goudie

17. Party Piece, c.1975 oil and charcoal on canvas, 124 x 208 cm

18. Morning Toilette, c.2002 oil on board, 75 x 61 cm

Goudie at 50

In 1983 my father celebrated his 50th birthday with an exhibition at the Fine Arts Society in Glasgow, Goudie at 50. He was at the height of his powers, an artist who had reached full maturity, and hanging on the walls were richly coloured still lifes, family portraits and nudes. The exhibition marked, in many ways, the close of the first act in my father’s career but it was also the first private view I had ever attended. I remember a huge crowd of friends including David Donaldson and John Cunningham as well as clients who had come from across the UK.

lachlan goudie

* 19. Maïnée in Fur Coat; À la Mode, c.1980 oil on canvas, 196 x 96 cm

Pensées Heureuses

My first encounter with the bohemian life of an Artist was in Glasgow in 1959. Recently arrived from France I could not have imagined what effect my new friends, Michelle and John Cunningham, were going to have on my life. They introduced me to Sandy who became my raison d’être, in every sense of the word. To be the wife, companion and muse of an artist is a privilege. You become part of a world of creativity; the silent observer of magical instances when, with a dash of paint or the contour of a line, something ordinary is transformed. An artist can elevate your mind and allow you to share in moments of wonder or make-believe but to achieve this they must have great talent, love and enthusiasm for their art. Sandy was not short of these qualities. Life with him was a daily rollercoaster of emotions. There were times of huge frustration. There were also times of great delight when he managed to capture on canvas what was in his imagination. Sandy was an artist who lived life to the full and being a part of that meant sharing in his reverie along with his melancholy. Artists can be very private when it comes to their feelings and their inner thoughts. The precarious balance of their emotions can demand a great deal of understanding and respect. Sharing the years with Sandy was always stimulating – I can assure you that there was never a dull moment. But it soon became clear that choosing to live with an artist of such joie de vivre and strength of character meant having to be generous and forgoing some of my own ambitions. Life together was, in return, hugely rewarding and enriching. The wonderful works of art which Sandy left us are a testament to that life and, for me, ensure that his soul and spirit remain amongst us. I dedicate these ‘Pensées Heureuses’, with all my love, to the memory of Sandy.

maïnée goudie

Joie de Vivre! The Art of Alexander Goudie, Memorial Exhibition, Paisley Art Gallery & Museum, 2008

20. Cancan, c.1975 oil on canvas, 196 x 96 cm

Throughout his life my father regularly painted self-portraits. ‘Why?’ I remember people asking when they visited our home, where every wall seemed to reflect a new incarnation of my dad. In part it’s because he was a very reliable model, a subject that allowed the artist to hone his own skills in portraiture. But perhaps more importantly, it was because this is what my dad’s heroes did. Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso, they all took control of their own image, simultaneously scrutinizing their identities in the mirror whilst projecting a painted performance. And for dad, the life of an artist was all about performance. In this exhibition alone we find him channelling Courbet, Guthrie and even, draping himself in a red scarf and assuming the role of Aristide Bruant, the French nightclub star immortalised by Toulouse-Lautrec.

lachlan goudie

21. Self Portrait with Red Scarf, c.1985 oil on canvas, 106 x 101 cm

GOUDIE’S GLASGOW