30 Artists & Illustratorswas a visual minefield. But this was also a place of work,
where my father had his studio. My brother, sister and
myself were usually free to wander into this room; to stand
bewitched by the paintings being created.
However, on occasions when the door was firmly shut,
an atmosphere of foreboding reigned: “Don’t bother your
father”, I would be told, not that it was likely. You could
sense the sulphur building behind the door in a cloud
of frustration.
Although, for my dad, painting and drawing was as
natural as breathing, it still demanded huge amounts of
effort and toil. “You gotta be tough!” was the outburst that
usually thundered from behind the door as things started
to go wrong, with expletives added in direct proportion to
the seriousness of the problem.TOP LEFT Salute,
Dusk, 1989,
watercolour on
p ap e r, 3 6x 27c m
TOP RIGHT Self-
Portrait with
Palette, 1985,
oil on canvas,
9 6x 117c m
BELOW The Chase,
2003, oil and
charcoal on board,
244x122cm
OPPOSITE PAGE
Portrait of Mainee
with Boa and
Mirror, 1980, oil on
canvas, 96x196cma girl named Marie-Renée Dorval. She introduced him to a
subject that would define his entire career: her homeland,
Brittany. From 1962 onwards, during annual summer trips,
Sandy sketched the face of a society that was virtually
unchanged from the previous century – a rural community
of potato pickers, labourers and fishermen folk. ‘Bretagne’
became his second home and unlike the studio-bound life
he led in Glasgow, summer was spent working en plein air.
Each year as he relaxed into the season, so his style
changed too. Brushstrokes became looser, the palette
more vibrant and he began to look closely at the work of
Gauguin and Émile Bernard – artists who had discovered
the wonders of this region before him. But when August
drew to a close, the painting cavalcade would return, to
hibernate, in Glasgow. While Scotland was cold and dark,
our home was a blisteringly exotic place.
Arnewood House was a Victorian mansion with grand
rooms painted alternately black, green, yellow and red.
There was a galleried staircase, an aviary which housed a
pair of cooing doves, and hanging upon the walls were huge
canvasses, many depicting my mother posing completely
nude. Herding my friends around the building as I grew up28 Lachlan Goudie.indd 30 17/02/2016 15:10