Alexander Goudie, Don Quixote Of Glasgow Artists
Bill Schenley
Alexander Goudie, painter: born Paisley, Renfrewshire 11
November 1933; married 1962 Maïnee Dorval (two sons, one
daughter); died Glasgow 9 March 2004.
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Alexander Goudie, painter and well-kent Glasgow character,
was powerfully handsome, honourable and outrageous,
arrogant, vastly entertaining and cultured; a man who was
driven by his art and quick to do battle, like a latter-day
Don Quixote. He fought his agents, fought philistines,
fought certain of his fellow artists and delighted to enter
the lists against any aspects of what he considered the
Establishment.
Sandy Goudie was born in 1933 at Paisley and, as a child,
showed prodigious talent for drawing. He studied at Glasgow
School of Art when William Armour was head of drawing and
painting, and David Donaldson was the ubiquitous influence.
Goudie, as a student at Glasgow, demonstrated his
extraordinary ability.
He received the Somerville Shanks Prize for Composition and,
later, his draughtsmanship and sense of colour was
recognised with the award of the Newbery Medal. As a young
artist he grew up admiring three great masters, Sir John
Lavery, George Henry and James Guthrie; all artists who had
bridged the gap between Glasgow and Paris. It was these
artists' glorious virtuoso control of oil paint that
appealed to Goudie, as well as their genre and realist
subject-matter.
For Goudie the exciting 20th-century developments in, for
instance, Futurism, Vorticism, Cubism, abstraction held
little attraction. A travelling postgraduate scholarship in
1953 introduced him to Paris where he fell in love with
Courbet - especially his Burial at Ornans - and with Rodin's
sculptures in the Musée Rodin. Goudie was attracted to
masterly but conventional art and went on to spend months in
Toledo and Madrid studying Velázquez and El Greco, and was
fascinated by their influence on later masters like Whistler
and Monet.
At his best, Goudie could draw better than any of his rivals
in Scotland and had the skill and eye to describe, as almost
no one else could, the sweating flanks of a cart-horse, the
toiling, foreshortened form of a Breton peasant, the sheen
on silk velvet, or the glow on a pretty girl's cheek. He
fell more and more in love with France and married a
delightful French girl, Marie-Renée ("Maïnee") Dorval in
Brittany. She, and her native Brittany, were to become the
lodestars of his art and life. He grew to love Gauguin more
and more and he began to see the Brittany landscape, and the
figures that inhabited it, through Gauguin's eyes.
Goudie's range was broad, combining great abilities as a
ceramic artist, as a portraitist, and as pictorial
raconteur. His Tam O'Shanter cycle of 54 paintings, which he
showed at the Edinburgh International Festival in 1996, were
an astonishing achievement and one that I still regret that
the Scottish National Galleries did not buy. Happily they
were acquired eventually for Alloway, in south Ayrshire
(where they may be seen at the Rozelle House Galleries).
Alexander Goudie was elected a member of the Glasgow Art
Club in 1956 and a member of the Royal Society of Portrait
Painters in 1970. He painted a portrait of the Queen for the
Caledonian Club, Glasgow (1992/93), and exhibited widely,
showing at Harari and Johns, in London, the Fine Art
Society, Glasgow, and the Musée de la Faïence, in Quimper.
One of the main problems for Sandy Goudie was that he was
blessed with real talent (and he knew it), but painted in a
style profoundly disliked by the contemporary arts
establishment; he cultivated, through his confident, rather
bombastic character, too many detractors. Like most artists
he was uneven, but there was magic and vision in his art
and, I expect, history will be kind to him.
Timothy Clifford
I first met Sandy Goudie as a fellow student at the Glasgow
School of Art in the early Fifties, writes James D.
Robertson. My first impression of him was that of a gangly,
thin-framed schoolboy and that he had beautiful, fine-boned
and eloquent hands. Because of our similar interests and
because we shared the same sense of humour (he once said
that we laughed our way through the Art School) we became
firm friends, a friendship that lasted until his death.
His frail appearance belied an immense talent as a painter,
draughtsman and sculptor. He was a dedicated student and
often worked through morning breaks and the lunch hour. It
was the custom in those days to present a major work after
the summer break. Whilst many of them were good, his was
always spectacular, possessing an astonishingly mature
technique. It was obvious that he was going to make his mark
as a painter. At the end of his fourth year he was awarded
the Newbery Medal, presented to the most talented student in
the art school - no one was surprised.
In that same year he was greatly influenced by the work of
Augustus John and to this end we took a nightmare bus trip
to London to see his exhibition at the Royal Academy. We
stayed in the sleaziest B&B I've ever seen and ended up
having a fight in what was laughingly described as a
"bedroom", ripping the sheets and damaging a wardrobe which
was falling to bits anyway.
After he left the Glasgow School of Art he set himself up in
a small studio in Paisley, producing volumes of work until
he contracted TB and spent about a year in a sanatorium.
When in the early Sixties he met and subsequently married
Maïnee, they lived in a small cottage outside Paisley where
we spent many hilarious evenings. As success came, they
moved to a beautiful house in the West End of Glasgow, where
by this time Sandy was producing portraits of the great and
the good, and fulfilling his early promise.
There were some who found him arrogant - most painters are,
perhaps to protect their often fragile confidence against
the slings and arrows aimed at them, often from their fellow
artists. I will never forget Sandy Goudie - outspoken, a
painter of great integrity, and above all, his own man.