Painting
In the Footsteps of the Scottish Colourists
Two years on from Lachlan Goudie’s Once Upon a Time, we are delighted to present Painting Paradise. The title is justified by some of the locations the artist has been able to visit but also has a second meaning; for Goudie painting is the paradise. Hard work and patience are virtues he has put to good use in his broadcasting work and his ability to articulate strong feelings in his writing and reading of art history has made him one of our best cultural commentators. Whilst broadcasting and writing is Lachlan’s career, painting is what he does.
Painting Paradise is divided into five sections. First, a short residency in the New Town of Edinburgh produced an elegant series of architectural interiors. Still life painting is his chief studio occupation and the natural beauty of flowers, and reflective or polished surfaces allow endless experimentation with composition and striking colour contrasts. From the city and studio, Lachlan journeyed to the Highlands and Western Isles; a
commission in Inverness-shire gave him the chance to work deep in ancient woodlands and capture the autumn colours of rolling countryside. Work took him to Barra, and he did not miss the opportunity to capture the fresh, Atlantic atmosphere en plein air. Strong parallels with Peploe and Cadell are continued with the work he made in the South of France in the autumn this year when he visited Beaulieu, Villefranche and Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Views through open-shuttered windows and down to the sparkling Mediterranean Côte d’Azur capture the high colour and heat of the sun. Finally, he was able to make a trip to Mauritius – in a sense the most conventional paradise he has ventured to paint. Here the palm trees, distant mountains and towering skies over the Indian Ocean invite us to walk with the artist on hot sand or take a place in the shade and watch the fishermen return at dusk.
The Scottish Gallery
Photograph by Adolfo MassazzaPainting Paradise
Painting pictures can often appear to be a solitary business – a tussle between an artist, their materials and the subject that confronts them. But every time I pick up a brush I don’t feel alone at all, in fact I sense a crowd of other painters gathered around me. They are my artist heroes, the people whose work I often study, the painters who always have something to teach me.
They come from across history and as I paint, I have a sense of them sitting at my elbow, encouraging me to look at a subject through their eyes. Sometimes they challenge me to better them, occasionally they warn me not to copy their approach too faithfully…
In recent years I have written a great deal about Scottish artists. So maybe it’s inevitable that a noisy contingent of Scots often forces its way to the front of all my imaginary companions; SJ Peploe, FCB Cadell and JD Fergusson. They make for good company.
As I’ve ventured back out into the world this year, it’s possible that my artist friends have nudged me along a particular path. Or perhaps I have inadvertently sought out the comfort of familiar places and destinations. But from Edinburgh to the Western Isles, from Barra to the Baie des Anges and beyond the blue horizon, I have found myself sometimes walking in the footsteps of the Scottish Colourists.
And just like those Scots arriving at their different destinations for the first time, everything has felt new to me – fresh and as yet untouched by my brush. A painting Arcadia. After months deprived of travel, I have rediscovered the
inspiration that comes from an unfamiliar environment; a change in the light, the heat of the sun. With every step and every painting, I have had an opportunity to celebrate what it felt like to be out in the world again.
As an artist, however, every journey leads back to the studio – the place where the toiling painter looks most alone. But my gang of rowdy artist mentors always find a way to squeeze through the door. It’s a bigger crowd now, not just the Scots. Matisse and Bonnard are there, William Nicholson and Winslow Homer too, amongst others.
They bustle in and gather round. They question what I’m doing, they offer me alternative approaches. I work surrounded by piles of books and cross reference their counsel against the weighty monographs written in their name. In their company even the humblest of exercises is transformed. Painting a studio still life becomes an absolute riot of risk, excitement, triumph and disaster.
And it’s in the studio that the archive of images created on the road from Barra to the Mediterranean and Mauritius, comes into its own. It’s here that sketches and memories simmer and ferment. Places recently visited rematerialize on canvas, memories saturated, colours heightened, experiences intensified. Together my mentors and memories conspire to make this small room and its disparate collection of objects, the ultimate painter’s paradise.
Lachlan Goudie Photographs by Adolfo MassazzaEdinburgh
Edinburgh is a place I had never painted before, but for ten days in February 2022 I was resident in the New Town. And whilst the grandeur of the city, its parks and panoramas would have made a great subject, I didn’t take my brushes out of the apartment once.
Instead, I simply looked through the Georgian windows to find my motif. In the process I began to see the city through the prism of all the great Scottish artists I associate with the capital; the cool precision of Allan Ramsay, Raeburn’s careful manipulation of the northern light, Cadell’s elegant New Town interiors.
The images I have created chart the thrill of painting a new subject, a place that was (for a Glaswegian) at once familiar and foreign – ranging across the apartment, searching out quiet vistas and trying to seize the brilliance of a fading winter sun.
3. Dusk in Edinburgh oil on canvas board, 30 x 40 cm
Town,
of Spring,
Still Life
In the last two years I have spent long periods in my studio, when otherwise I might have been travelling. In those moments I often turn to painting the still life, a perennial preoccupation.
The flowers, some from my garden, helped bring the promise of the outside world and wider horizons, into my studio. For me the process of arranging and painting these compositions was not about expressing the stillness of life but its exuberance and vitality. These paintings are a celebration of the infinite surprises and challenges inherent in depicting simple things.
The still life is also an opportunity to engage in a dialogue with other painters – to learn lessons from the way they have explored similar subjects. In this period Cadell and Peploe have been my constant guides, revealing different ways in which colour can be amplified or used to bring a powerful sense of structure to arrangements of silver and silk, velvet and porcelain.
7. Late Bloom oil on linen, 40 x 40 cm
9. Summer Bouquet oil on linen, 20 x 20 cm
Midnight Still Life
on board,
x
cm
This was an image painted in late February, with the promise of Spring and the hope of renewal, warmth, and abundance in the air. Whilst many of my still life paintings were influenced by a study of Cadell and Peploe’s approach, this image is also deeply indebted to their contemporary, Henri Matisse. The colliding patterns and layers of fabric are inspired by his studio still lifes and sitting on the pile of books at the bottom of the painting, is a monograph dedicated to Matisse’s work.
11. Everything in Bloom oil on board, 102 x 76 cm
14. Special Occasion
on board, 48 x 56 cm
15. Summer Rose
on linen, 40 x 40 cm
Garden Rose oil on board, 40 x 40cm
17. Anemones
oil on linen, 20 x 20 cm
18. The Green Vase oil on linen, 20 x 20 cm
19. Flowers in Winter oil on linen, 20 x 20 cm
Highlands & Western Isles
In the summer of 1919, FCB Cadell returned to the island of Iona for the first time since World War I. The experience for him must have been transcendental. The images he created on this, and on his annual return visits to the Western Isles, still convey a sense of the healing power and beauty of those Islands.
Over the last two years, the Isle of Barra has provided me with a similar kind of refuge. The sketches in this exhibition were created on the move and in the elements. Some may even contain the grains of sand blown off the dunes. And each one is an attempt to capture the cleansing clarity of light and vibrancy of colour, which can feel so startling on first arriving in the Hebrides.
Painting Scotland is never easy. The precedent of those artists in whose footsteps you follow, can be disconcerting. And the weather, the wet and the fast-changing light often conspire against you. In Inverness-shire last year, the autumn closed in quickly. But the low skies and damp conditions created a different kind of beauty.
Painting with a subdued palette from the shelter of a bivouac, I fought to catch the flash of an October sun before it sank beneath the treeline. These are the moments that live with you. Once in the studio, they fuelled my easel paintings with a remembered sense of the urgency and the jeopardy that is a part of sketching in the field.
20. The Manse, Barra oil on board, 86.5 x 96.5 cm
You’ll never find this spot, hidden deep in a tangled forest in Inverness-shire. The pool is replenished by waters from a neighbouring loch and the sticks and branches piled up in the right-hand corner, are part of a dam constructed by wild beavers. It’s a place of complete isolation and there are few noises, other than the wind in the trees, to interrupt the constant trickle and splash of water.
25. The Lochan oil on board, 86 x 97 cm
The Hidden Pool
on board, 51 x 76 cm
Deep in the Woods gouache on board, 25 x 33 cm
South of France
The South of France has been a second home for me. I have family there and I have returned to paint there regularly. However, travelling to the South of France after a gap of three years made for a painting trip like no other. The warmth of the sun, the shift in the light, a sparkle on the Mediterranean conspired to rejuvenate my energy and allowed me to look at familiar places with fresh eyes.
The Côte d’Azur has been a painting paradise for 150 years. Matisse, Bonnard, and the great JD Fergusson, amongst countless others, have visited and revisited it on canvas and in watercolour.
The subject is eternal but the challenge of compressing a Southern sunburst of colour and optimism, onto a small painted panel, is new every time.
Painting a picture is always a story of visual problems solved, ideas processed and realised. But it’s also, for me, about taking external influences from the weather to the soundscape and filtering them through the end of the brush. Each image is intended as a small, sensory portal, a window to a warmer place. Creating each one was a process of revitalisation, helping propel me through the winter months that followed.
One of my most treasured painting spots on the Côte d’Azur, is the Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild, in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. It is a place of exquisite beauty; a rose-coloured villa set amidst tranquil gardens, with views out over the Mediterranean. From the balconies and terraces you catch a glimpse of other villas nestled along the coastline, little dream-palaces partly hidden amongst palm trees and pines. Painting at the Villa Rothschild is, for me, a great escape. When I am back in the bustle and business of everyday life in London, it’s the place where my imagination runs to.
40. La Vie en Rose oil on board, 86 x 97 cm
41. Riviera
on board, 86 x 97 cm
42. Happy Days oil on board, 92.5 x 74 cm
Finding Villa Ephrussi
on board, 74 x 92.5 cm
Méditerranée
on board, 86 x 97 cm
The balcony window is a motif that recurs frequently in art history. Matisse and Bonnard made a habit of depicting the Côte d’Azur as seen from inside the many apartments and houses they used as studios across the South of France. My mother, who is French, has lived in Nice for many years. I often paint the view from her own apartment window, looking out across the neighbourhood park. But in this painting, I have re-modelled reality and portrayed the ideal balcony, adding a view towards the sea which my mother can only dream of.
47. Rue de France
oil on board, 102 x 76 cm
Living in Arcadia
on board, 86 x 97 cm
Mauritius
In the spring of 2020, I was scheduled to travel to Mauritius on a painting expedition. Like so many of our plans, this journey was frustrated. And so, for two years Mauritius existed in my imagination as a kind of talisman. It promised the sort of overwhelming colour and creative freedom artists like Gauguin had sought in the Pacific and JD Fergusson experienced in Antibes when he first visited the Mediterranean over a century ago.
When it finally came, in the spring of 2022, my pilgrimage to the Southern Hemisphere did not disappoint. I discovered a genuine painting paradise. A place where the unfamiliar colours of the tropics, the abundance of exotic vegetation and the great rolling, skyscapes of the Indian Ocean energised and delighted me, from dawn to dusk.
The skies above the Indian Ocean can appear infinitely vast. When viewed, during the day, from across the lagoon, the expanse of blue is interrupted only by a white line of surf along the reef’s edge. In the evening the sky and the sea flood into one another, creating a glowing immensity of rose and gold. Each night the returning fishermen make their appearance, slipping quietly across the horizon at the end of another day to remember.
59. A Day to Remember acrylic on board, 76 x 102 cm
Beyond the Blue Horizon
on board, 76 x 102 cm
Ocean
board,
cm
The extraordinary abundance of flowers, palm trees and vegetation in Mauritius was eye-popping for someone who had never painted in the Tropics. As an artist I sometimes felt, rather like the villa in this painting, overwhelmed by the beauty of my new environment. My challenge was to try and create images that could express my experience, the sensory intoxication of being surrounded by songbirds, the perfume of evening blooms, the cascading patterns of foliage and myriad shades of green.
70. Jardin Exotique
acrylic on board, 76 x 102 cm
Lachlan Goudie (b.1976)
Lachlan Goudie is an artist who exhibits regularly in London and New York. The scope of Lachlan’s work is broad, incorporating portraiture, still life and landscape painting. His canvasses have won numerous awards and in 2013 he was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, in London. In addition to painting, Lachlan is also a writer and Arts broadcaster. In 2015 he wrote and presented the landmark series The Story of Scottish Art for the BBC. The four episodes were critically acclaimed and Lachlan was nominated by the Royal Television Society Scotland for the ‘Onscreen personality of the year’ award.
Lachlan has written and presented several other documentaries for BBC television – The Art of Witchcraft (2013), Stanley Spencer: The Colours of the Clyde (2014), Awesome Beauty: The Art of Industrial Britain (2017) and Mackintosh: Glasgow’s Neglected Genius (2018). Lachlan’s most recent film Inside Museums: Glasgow’s Treasure Palace was broadcast on BBC4 in 2022. Lachlan has been a judge across three series of BBC1’s Big Painting Challenge and reprised this role on BBC1’s Celebrity Big Painting Challenge, 2018. He is also an expert presenter of BBC4’s Life Drawing Live! (2020 and 2021). Lachlan regularly contributes to the BBC World Service radio programme, From Our Own Correspondent and has presented several concerts on BBC Radio 3.
Lachlan’s first book, The Story of Scottish Art, was published by Thames & Hudson in September 2020. Lachlan’s writing is informed by his experience of working as an artist. He is a keen proselytiser for the value of technique and craft in contemporary art and was schooled in painting by his father, the artist Alexander Goudie. The wonder of art: its power to colour and change people’s lives fascinates Lachlan. It lies at the heart of his work as a painter, writer and broadcaster. Lachlan was born and grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, before studying English at Christ’s College, Cambridge and Fine Art at Camberwell College of Art in London.
The Story of Scottish Art by Lachlan Goudie
Thames & Hudson • 181 illustrations £29.95 hardback • £25 paperback Signed copies available in The Gallery.
The Story of Scottish Art is a page-turning narrative full of scandals and rebellion, seismic historical events and personal tragedies that inspired or destroyed artists. It is the epic story of how 5000 years of creativity defined a nation – from the earliest Neolithic symbols etched onto the landscape of Kilmartin Glen to Glasgow’s fame as a contemporary centre of artistic innovation.
Selected Recent Exhibitions
2022 Painting Paradise, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
2020 Once Upon a Time, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
2019 Shipyard, The Glasgow Art Club, Glasgow
2018 A Year at the Easel, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh
Shipyard, National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth
2017 Shipyard, The Scottish Maritime Museum, Irvine
2015 New Paintings, Lachlan Goudie and Tim Benson, Mall Galleries, London
A Place in the Sun, The Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Glasgow
2014 These Precious Things, The Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York
2012 Still Life and the Opera, Glyndebourne, Lewes
Lands of Streams and Timber, The Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Glasgow
2011 A True Wilderness Heart, The Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York
Sketch drawing prize 2011, The Rabley Drawing Centre, Marlborough
2010 The River Runs Through It, Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow
Of the Moment, Roger Billcliffe Gallery, Glasgow
2009 Dreaming Places, The Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York
Awards
2011 The Royal Society of Painters in Oil Colour, W&N Award for Young Artists
2001 Royal Scottish Academy, The Norman MacFarlane Charitable Trust Award
1999 The Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, R.S.P. Prize for painting at the annual exhibition University of Cambridge, The Levy-Plumb Scholarship in the Visual Art
Society Memberships
2013 Royal Institute of Oil Painters
Selected Broadcasting Credits
2022 Inside Museums: Glasgow’s Treasure Palace, BBC4
2021, 2020 Life Drawing Live!, BBC2
2020 Inside Museums: The National Galleries of Scotland, BBC4
2019 Mackintosh: Glasgow’s Neglected Genius, BBC4
Painting the Holy Land, BBC1
2018 Awesome Beauty, BBC4
2015 The Story of Scottish Art, BBC2
Education
2004 Camberwell College of Arts, The London Institute
1999 Christ’s College, University of Cambridge
Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition
Lachlan Goudie Painting Paradise
3–26 November 2022
Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/lachlangoudie
ISBN: 978 1 912900 58 9
Produced by The Scottish Gallery Designed by Kenneth Gray Printed by Pureprint Group
All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers. All essays and picture notes copyright The Scottish Gallery.