la mer et la terre

from Alexander Goudie | An Artists Life Act I | July 2021 | The Scottish Gallery

en famille

André Marc, ‘Le Chanteur’, aboard his fishing boat, Loctudy, c.1959

Goudie’s First Rencontre with Brittany

When I was born in 1976, my father was fortythree years old. By then he had been visiting and painting Brittany for over fifteen years and the story of his first rencontre with a landscape that would dominate his life as an artist, existed as part of a kind family lore.

I remember dad holding forth at the dinner table as he recounted (yet again) his first visit to Brittany. My father described an impossibly romantic tale, one that flickered across my imagination, like a Pathé newsreel. It was December 1959, only a matter of months since he had met a young French girl named Marie-Renée Dorval in Glasgow, and now he was on his way to meet the parents. I visualised an animated route map, tracking his train journey from Scotland, across the channel aboard the boat-train, and onwards to Paris, where he boarded the ‘Quimper Express’.

The ‘Express’, the story goes, turned out to be a provincial work-horse which crawled along the twilight chemin de fer, calling in at every regional town and village. And with every stop it seemed to dad that he was sliding decades into the past, as autoroutes gave way to muddy rural roads, tractors to horse-drawn ploughs, wide canopied stations to draughty platforms and telegraph offices.

Six hours later my father finally disembarked in Quimper sporting a black, full-length trench coat and a distinct Paisley pallor. Here was an artistvampire hungry for inspiration but despite his epic journey he found himself in a town doing a very good impression of Glasgow; the streets were wintery, dark and damp. My mother, of course, brightened the encounter and was soon introducing her young Scottish artist to the family; five sisters, one of her five brothers, a suspicious pair of aunts and her parents, Dr Louis Dorval and his wife, Margeaux.

There was, inevitably, a banquet, sudden and total immersion within the epic scale of Breton hospitality. Rich food, to which my father was unaccustomed, copious amounts of Muscadet which he accepted enthusiastically and the rowdy clamour of conversation and questions in a language he couldn’t understand. At one point my father excused himself, went to the bathroom and was sick. He returned, even paler than before, and accepted another glass of wine.

Between Christmas and New Year my father was introduced to a new diet, a new landscape, a new culture. At first, however, he struggled to envisage how these experiences could ever filter into his paintings. He couldn’t see past the grey weather, the grey granite, the elements of the landscape that seemed familiar from Scotland. And then one day Dr Dorval drove the couple to a little seaside port called Loctudy. The harbour looked out across a sea-estuary towards another village and a lighthouse. Next to the quay was a villa with a pointed turret and elegant green balconies. This was Villa Ker Jane and Dr Dorval and his family were going to move there in the New Year.

My father was twenty-six years old. In Paisley he lived at home with his parents in a one-bedroom flat with a view of the tenements opposite. Sandy Goudie didn’t know that Loctudy would prove fundamental to his development as an artist. But standing on that quayside, looking out across the water in the strong Atlantic sunlight, watching gulls spiral across the sky and colourful fishing boats returning with their catch, the possibility of future paintings slipped into focus.

Before this new chapter in family lore could be written however, Alexander Goudie returned, alone, to Paisley. There he fell dangerously ill with tuberculosis and for six months he languished in a sanitorium. It was a demoralising and depressing experience from which he eventually emerged thin, drained of energy and contemplating his future with bloodshot eyes.

Tuberculosis was the catalyst which prompted my parents to accelerate their marriage plans. But also, and perhaps just as significantly, it crystalised in my father a determination to paint images that celebrated the vitality and great beauty of life. No subject would provide him with more inspiration than Brittany. Following their wedding in 1962 and setting a precedent that would be repeated every year for the next four decades, Sandy and Maïnée Goudie spent the summer in Loctudy at Villa Ker Jane.

Brittany in 1962 was not the tourist destination it is now. There were no daily ferries disgorging hoards of caravans and campers throughout the summer. It was, instead, a relatively isolated region of France whose economy, when compared to the heavily industrialised West of Scotland, was underdeveloped and primarily agricultural. Sud Finistère, the department at the extreme West where Loctudy was situated was poor, largely ignored by Parisian politics and practically forgotten by time.

Trawlermen fished the inshore waters for langoustines, sardines and hake, whilst smallholders and farmers harvested seaweed from the local beaches and potatoes from the sandy soil of the surrounding fields. It was a region that embodied the overlapping worlds of farming and fishing, la mer et la terre, which characterised so much of the Breton identity.

During those summer visits in the early 1960s, Dr Dorval would grant his son-in-law the use of his car. Dad would head off down the country lanes at the wheel of a black Citroen DS, drawing boards in the back seat. En route he would scan the horizon for a ploughman or a group of fieldworkers, suddenly stopping when a subject appeared round the bend. Using a mixture of pigeon-French, extravagant hand gestures and a broad grin, my father would manage to establish himself as an unthreatening presence, then he would begin to draw.

His subjects, fieldworkers bent over their artichokes or trawlermen repairing their nets, might straighten up and briefly stare at him through narrow eyes. Sometimes they would turn their backs or disappear into a cabin and observe him through a window. But more often than not they would nod, unsmilingly, and carry

on. Occasionally, when a pigman or a market stallholder would remonstrate with him, my father would cheerfully holler ‘Bonjour’ and repeat the tested password, ‘Le Docteur Dorval!’

As the rural GP for many decades, Dr Dorval was known across the territory. It was a name that quelled suspicion and granted access. It was this name that explains why, more than once, the bearded stranger was invited inside to draw the occupants sorting potatoes, stringing onions. On one occasion he spent an afternoon in an earth-floored cottage, drawing two farmers as they slipped into a cider-fuelled stupor.

Every artist thrives on a motif, a subject in which they can immerse themselves. In the 1960s and 70s, Dad knew that in Brittany he had found something extraordinary, a well of inspiration, a place and a people that demanded to be drawn, painted and documented. Just as Catterline was for Joan Eardley, or the beach at Machrihanish was for William McTaggart, Loctudy and its environs became a creative focal point throughout my father’s career. It was the one location he returned to time and again, a landscape which he explored from every viewpoint, every angle and under every weather condition. It was a place he interpreted in his paintings and a place that shaped the way he painted.

The piles of sketchbooks that resulted from those early decades, however, bear witness to a sense urgency. On every page is the evidence of an artist collecting snapshots like a lawyer collects evidence; harbourside debris, anchors and lobsterpots, a church altar, a rusty scythe. Details recorded for future deployment on canvas. And then of course there were the sketched portraits; weather-blasted faces, women lost in prayer, fieldworkers plunging their fat-fingered hands into the earth. André Marc, Madame Nicot, Madame Tanguy, Monsieur Thomas; dad knew many of them by name and he also knew that what he was witnessing would not last long. That these farmers in their velvet waistcoats and the women wearing bigoudènes headdresses, were the end of a story; the conclusion of an uninterrupted history of tradition and custom that had spanned generations.

As he drew on the harbourside or at the edge of the wheatfield, dad was observing the social and economic evolution of a place and people. But he was also, and very consciously, taking his place in an artistic timeline, one that linked him directly to other artists who had entrenched themselves within rural communities: Van Gogh, Millet, Bastien-Lepage. It wasn’t lost on him that fellow Scots, James Guthrie and the Glasgow Boys, had not only revered the traditions of French painting but had, in many cases, travelled to France to seek out and paint in countryside retreats, rather like Loctudy.

Prior to my father’s first trip in 1959, Brittany had already become a favourite imaginary destination. During visits to the National Gallery of Scotland he had devoted long hours to studying his favourite painting, Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon. This psychedelic depiction of the nun’s at Pont Aven, clothed in black, crowned in bizarre headdresses and framed against a red background as ferocious as their religious fervour, would become a creative talisman. It wasn’t only that Gauguin was a pathfinder, an artist who established for my dad an extraordinary iconography for depicting Brittany. It’s that he channelled into his work an emotional charge so powerful, that merely looking at his paintings seemed to intensify the glorious experience of being alive. Gauguin’s use of composition and colour deeply influenced the style of painting which my father began to evolve in the late 1970s and 80s.

By this time Alexander Goudie had been documenting life in Brittany for almost twenty years and there had been a shift in the character

of Loctudy and its environs. Tourism was replacing agriculture as the primary economic activity. Gradually my dad turned his attention from the fields and the fishermen to the holiday makers who filled the beach in front of Villa Ker Jane. My father would spend his days outside on the terrace or stationed at one of the balconies. From there he would watch the tide sweep in and out and paint canvasses saturated with summer sunlight and exuberance; parasols in the sand, seagulls gliding across an azure sky.

These paintings were fuelled by euphoria. My father had spent his childhood summers on the Scottish Coast, two weeks in Girvan or St Andrews, then back to Paisley. For Alexander Goudie, the months at Villa Ker Jane never lost their sense of exoticism. The light, the gentle lifestyle, the lunch table spread with a mountain of seafood, salads and great bowls of fresh fruit – for an artist who had endured tuberculosis, someone whose most cherished culinary memory was the first taste of a banana during post war rationing, whose childhood experience of summer was limited to the limp rays of the sun, shining hesitantly over the Firth of Clyde, an August spent in Loctudy was sensory overdrive. Increasingly this was the portrait that he wanted to paint – a land of luxe, calme et volupté. This vision would drive the series of paintings, sculptures and ceramics which my father would produce over the next twenty years, the final chapter in the story of Goudie’s Brittany.

lachlan goudie

34. Portrait of Le Chanteur, c.1989 pastel and chalk on paper, 43 x 35 cm

This man was a favourite subject of my father’s, a local fisherman called André Marc who was known as ‘Le Chanteur’, or ‘The Singer’. He earned this nickname due to his habit of regularly bursting into song on the quayside after a few too many glasses of ‘rouge’. He eventually, perhaps inevitably, fell into the harbour one evening and drowned. Most of the skippers and trawler crews were a laconic bunch but they honoured dad with his own, rather unoriginal, soubriquet. Every summer when he reappeared on the harbour with his sketchbooks, they would look up and nod an acknowledgement, ‘Ah, l’artiste!’

lachlan goudie

35. Breton Paysage, c.1965 pastel on paper, 28 x 42 cm

36. Bedroom at Ker Jane, c.1980 chalk and gouache on paper, 45 x 56 cm

Back of the House generates a strong memory, for me, of Villa Ker Jane, the home of my grandparents in Loctudy. This house would become the setting and backdrop for many of my father’s works as well as being the meeting point for a gigantic family of cousins, children of my mother’s ten brothers and sisters. This drawing depicts the kitchen window, the room where my mother and grandmother would cook together, preparing great platters of seafood, mussels and langoustines.

gwen goudie Villa Ker Jane, the Dorval family home in Loctudy, Brittany, c.1980

37. Back of the House, c.1985 pastel and chalk on paper, 52 x 78 cm

* 38. Studies of Praying Bigoudène, c.1995 pencil on paper, 45 x 64 cm * 39. Study of Breton Fieldworkers, c.1990 pencil and watercolour on paper, 46 x 57 cm

* 40. Potato Picker, c.1960 pastel and chalk on paper, 49 x 64 cm * 41. Labourers at Work in the Fields, c.1995 pencil on paper, 28.5 x 39 cm

42. Vase with Fouesnantaises, c.1995 ceramic, 36 x 18 cm 43. Vase with Gwenn-ha-du, c.1995 ceramic, 36 x 18 cm

44. Goudie’s Brittany, c.1990 gouache on board, 55 x 75 cm

45. The Wave, c.1989 acrylic on board, 122.5 x 224 cm

As a boy I had often accompanied my father to sketch the religious processions and local festivals that interrupt the months of July and August in Brittany. Dad could fill a sketchbook in one afternoon, drawing the people dressed up in traditional costume; the Breton bagpipe players; the dancers performing their circular gavotte and singing along to the music.

lachlan goudie

46. La Gavotte, c.1989 chalk and pastel on paper, 20 x 63 cm

47. Bigoudène, c.1980 chalk on paper, 39 x 25 cm

Breton Funeral represents one of the most important works from my father’s early period in Brittany. The powerful composition and tonal control are a distillation of lessons he had learned from great artists like Courbet and Guthrie, who tackled the sombre subject of a rural funeral in their own work. This painting manages to convey a sense of the dignity and stoicism my father had come to admire in the people he befriended in Brittany, a community underpinned by faith and resilience in the face of the elements and often very challenging lives.

lachlan goudie

48. Breton Funeral, 1965–66 oil on canvas, 106 x 100 cm

49. Chapel Interior, c.1985 oil and chalk on canvas, 152 x 152 cm

A painted homage to Paul Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon. Alexander Goudie’s experience of living in Brittany made him appreciate even more intensely the power of Gauguin’s work. Vision After the Sermon was the painting he most admired as a student in the National Gallery of Scotland. Here it features as an image pinned to the background. Goudie employs Gauguin’s technique of simplifying his composition with blocks of colour. He uses the paint sparely, producing a still life inspired by the stark religious fervour of the farmers and fishermen he came to know in Brittany.

lachlan goudie

50. After the Sermon, 1989 oil on canvas, 81 x 81 cm

Painting in Loctudy, c.1965

Goudie painting on the harbourside, Roscoff, c.1989

Goudie at Loctudy, c.1985 Photograph: John Thomson

I work best from an inner discipline, not sitting around waiting to be inspired or looking… This is where my strengths come from. Some artists just look for a subject that they already have a solution for. I don’t do that. My paintings differ sometimes because I may make five or six studies of a subject and I try to let it tell me how to respond. By being in Loctudy, in that garden [at the Villa Ker Jane], on the terrace with these balconies, the windows, it became a great studio for me. The house faces north and provides lots of different kinds of light. In the evening at five o’clock is a fascinating time on a certain kind of day when the clouds are blown away to the east and the fishing boats are coming in. I’ve painted that view hundreds of times now, by making myself come to terms with the pictorial problems it presented. The energy of these boats coming in, speeding past the chequerboard of the lighthouse on Île-Tudy; a white house on an island, the metal chimney of an old factory silhouetted against the sky all gave form and pattern, a sense of construction to these pictures. Then I began to look down from the balcony to the beach and the water’s edge. I painted pictures of people coming in and out of the water, sitting on the beach, sunbathing. It gave me a lot of unusual angles, so high up. Gradually the whole thing came together and Loctudy became a confirmed and favourite subject for me. The house was vital, both its views out to sea and across the beach, and inside with the life of the kitchen. There were always lots of visitors bringing baskets of vegetables from the fields or fish and shellfish from the harbour. I would draw the peasants and also members of the family, especially an old aunt, Tante Germaine, who was a fantastic model for me. Peeling potatoes, shelling prawns, sitting in an old rocking chair knitting, she became a favourite subject.

alexander goudie

* 51. Seagulls over Ker Jane, c.1989 watercolour on paper, 77 x 56 cm