La Gavotte, c. 1989

Alexander Goudie is widely regarded as one of Scotland’s finest figurative painters. He enrolled in the Glasgow School of Art at just 17, and though he was reportedly boisterous and opinionated, he was focussed on developing traditional skills in painting. He was inspired by Manet, Velazquez and Van Dyke, and along with his peers and contemporaries, David Donaldson, Jimmy Robertson, John Cunningham, Duncan Shanks and John Byrne was trained to understand the alchemy of paint. His son, painter and broadcaster Lachlan Goudie explains:
‘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.’