Art & Industry brings together artists past and present who have all found inspiration in the industrial landscape of northern Britain.
Artists include: Frederick Austin | David Cook | Kate Downie | Robert Eadie | Lachlan Goudie | Ernest Burnett Hood | David McClure | Michael McVeigh
Frederick Austin was a British painter, etcher, and engraver. Austin studied at Leicester College of Art and RCA. For his work Flight into Egypt, he won the Prix de Rome in 1927, five years after his brother Robert Sargeant Austin had done before him in 1922. In his early career, he gained influence and inspiration from his brother, but over time an individual style emerged more modernist in outlook. In his printed works, religious subject matter is recurring, as well as inspiration from medieval sources. Together with his brother, Austin was one of the few original printmakers to continue with traditional printmaking techniques after World War II. He exhibited widely including the RA and RE. Austin’s work is held in several public collections including the Ashmolean and V&A.
Cook was born in 1957 in Dunfermline and attended Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee from 1979-84. He was recognised early as an exceptional talent, winning the first prize at the annual student show at the Royal Scottish Academy in 1983. He then won a travel award which took him to Paris, Amsterdam, Belgium and Cyprus. He won the Guthrie Award at the RSA in 1985 and was given Scottish Arts Council Awards in 1985, 1988 and 1989. He has exhibited irregularly but notably at The Traverse Theatre in 1982 and with the 369 Gallery throughout the following decade.
In the 1990s he was already visiting Seagreens (his current home) and staying at a cottage at Benholm, two miles to the North also frequented by Alberto Morocco and Ian Eadie. Cook travelled regularly in these years to Turkey, the Balearics and significantly, at the invitation of the Everard Reed Gallery, to Southern Africa for three months in 1997. He was able to secure the tenancy at Seagreens shortly after his return and eventually bought it in 2004. This sense of belonging is now deeply embedded; he can see the seasons change and paint the whole calendar; the daffodils of Spring, wild flowers of Summer, the Autumn skies and bleak drama of Winter are all on show: immediate, raw and compelling.
Kate Downie was born in North Carolina but raised from the age of 7 in Scotland. She studied at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen before travel and residencies took her to the United States, England, Amsterdam, Paris and Japan. Her constant search for new challenges and inspirations has seen her set up studios in such diverse places as a brewery, an oil rig, and an abandoned Hydroponicum.
As a Landscape painter her subject matter is often the man-made rather than the natural, but it is defined by good draughtsmanship and a sense of movement.
‘One of my creative concerns is to define these spaces between buildings rather than the buildings themselves. The object lesson for me is the witnessing and the drawing of these nonplaces which are also, by definition, public arenas of cumulative activity. My job as an artist is to accommodate these actions in our contemporary lives, and to find the poetry within.’
– Kate Downie
Robert Eadie was born in Glasgow in 1877 and studied at the Glasgow School of Art, as well as Munich and Paris. An elegant portraitists, book illustrator and rural and town landscape in oils and water-colours. He was also an engraver, and artist in black and white. His soon garnered attention and he was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts and before 1914 also at the Paris Salon. Eadie also exhibited at the Royal Academy, London and the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh. He was also a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, where he also frequently exhibited. He was prominent in civic life and was elected president of Glasgow Art Club. As an illustrator of books he illustrated “The Face of Glasgow”, published in 1938 and and “The Face of Edinburgh”, published in 1938. More recently his paintings also preface “The University of Glasgow Library: Friendly Shelves”, 2016.
Lachlan Goudie studied English at Christ’s College, Cambridge before completing a Fine Art Degree at Camberwell College of Art. He regularly exhibits in his hometown of Glasgow, as well as Edinburgh, London and New York. He has won numerous awards, and in 2013 he was elected a member of the Royal Institute of Oil painters in London. As well as a painter, Lachlan works as a successful broadcaster and author. His popular 4-part BBC series, A Story of Scottish Art, led to the publication of an engaging and insightful book of the same name, to positive reviews.
The scope of Lachlan’s work is broad, incorporating portraiture, still life and landscape painting. He was schooled in painting by his father from an early age, and is a keen advocate for the value of technique, craft and tradition in contemporary art. Frequent painting trips abroad, during which he sketches in the open air whilst on the road, allow him to observe, document and celebrate the world around us.
‘I am a Glasgow boy. I was born in that city and my father, the artist Alexander Goudie, studied and taught at the Glasgow School of Art. The legacy of those late 19th Century artists who came to be known as the ‘Boys’, made a deep impression on my dad. When I was a young apprentice painter, he taught me their techniques and alerted me to the qualities which distinguished their work; assiduous control of tone, the use of square-edged brushes, an affinity with those French painters whose approach combined realism and naturalism.’
– Lachlan Goudie
Ernest Burnett Hood was born in Edinburgh and studied at the Glasgow School of Art where he became closely affiliated with William and Mary Armour. Following a period on the staff of GSA he worked as a full-time painter concentrating on Glasgow scenes, across painting and printmaking. He was a keen member of Glasgow Art Club and a lifelong friend of Alexander Goudie. He is best known for his oils and watercolours of industrial landscapes and topographical scenes. He exhibited with the Royal Scottish Academy between 1956-1972.
McClure was one of a group of highly regarded young painters that included James Cumming, William Baillie, John Houston, Elizabeth Blackadder and David Michie all of whom graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in the early 1950s. Their formative years benefited from the examples of a remarkable concentration of talent in the capital, both on the Art College staff and in the annual exhibitions of the RSA, RSW, SSA or SSWA. In addition, The Scottish Gallery was regularly showing established artists such as Anne Redpath, William Gillies, William MacTaggart, as well as younger artists like Joan Eardley and Robin Philipson. McClure and many of his Edinburgh College peers soon joined them. McClure had his first one-man show with The Scottish Gallery in 1957 and the following decade saw regular exhibitions of his work.
He was included in the important surveys of contemporary Scottish art which began to define the Edinburgh School throughout the 1960s and culminated in his Edinburgh Festival show at The Gallery in 1969. But he was, even by 1957 (after a year’s painting in Florence and Sicily) at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, alongside his great friend Alberto Morrocco, applying the rigour and inspiration that made the college such a bastion of painting.
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions: 1957, 1962, 1966, 1969 (Festival), 1989, 1992, 1994, 1996 (70th Birthday Exhibition), 2000 (Memorial), 2003, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2019, 2022
Michael McVeigh was born in 1957 in the post-war council estate of Lochee, Dundee located on the north west of the city, one of five children. He left school with no formal qualifications; however he wanted to be an artist and so began, unannounced, going to classes at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, his presence being challenged eventually. James Morrison, then one of the lecturers, formalised his position and accepted him as a full-time student based only on his outstanding drawings and painting.
Since moving to Edinburgh in 1982 McVeigh became a familiar figure seen regularly working in the city and until a few years ago as a street artist. Life as a street artist brought a certain amount of unwanted celebrity status, especially in recent years, becoming a cult figure sought out by the city’s stag and hen parties, eventually having to limit tourists to ‘one photo only’.
Michael McVeigh is a modern day folk artist who depicts the world around him. He is a participant observer who has created a naïve and sophisticated setting for contemporary life and history. There is something of the medieval chronicler about him; he draws and paints what is there, and what is worth depicting because it is an essential, occasionally quirky, part of human existence.
His works are held in both public and private collections including town halls, pubs, fishmongers and a number of municipal and national institutions.
Bruce Thomson – or ‘Adam B’, as he was often called – was a painter of great integrity whose long, productive life tells the story of Scottish painting for the first three quarters the twentieth century. Thomson was born in 1885, attending first the Trustees Academy and then the newly established Edinburgh College of Art where he received diplomas in both Drawing and Painting, and Architecture before scholarships took him abroad to Spain and then Paris. He was an accomplished etcher and lithographer and he also sought expertise in the difficult media of pastel and watercolour. By the 1920s, his technique was closest to S.J. Peploe, Cadell and other contemporaries favouring the technique of painting on a gesso ground with an oil-reduced vehicle so the subjects tended to be treated in flat areas of colour.
Thomson served in the Great War before returning to the College where he taught etching, composition and still life to the painting school and colour theory to the architecture students. His association with Edinburgh College of Art continued until his death as, although he retired from teaching in 1950, he continued as an examiner and a Trustee. His links with both the RSA, where he was Treasurer for seven years and the RSW, where he served as President for a further seven years from 1957 were very important to him. He was awarded an OBE in 1963. In 2024 the City Art Centre in Edinburgh is holding a major retrospective of his work, The Quiet Path, his first major exhibition in a public institution, to coincide The Gallery will honour Thomson with an exhibition in September 2024.
Zyw was born in Lida, Poland before moving to Warsaw at an early age. He enrolled in Warsaw School of Fine Art in 1926. A travel bursary in 1934 was to have a great effect on the young Pole, not only did it give him a taste for life outside of Poland, but it started a love affair with the Mediterranean which was to last a lifetime.
He found himself in Corsica when the War broke out, and travelled back to his home in Paris to enlist. After the French Army’s collapse Zyw escaped to Scotland to where the Polish Armed Forces were regrouping. After another spell on the front line as official war artist he settled in Dean Village in Edinburgh, before moving permanently to Italy in the 1970s. During his time in Edinburgh, he has a profound impact on the city with a number of notable exhibitions, including three with The Scottish Gallery, and later retrospectives organised by the Scottish Arts Council and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. He continued to paint up to his death at his olive farm in Castagneto Carducci in Tuscany, Italy.
He had his first one-man show at The Scottish Gallery in 1945. His most recent exhibition was held in November 2020 titled Before & After.
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