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Still Life with Bottles and Open Drawer would have been painted in Alexander Goudie’s studio in our family home in Glasgow. My father’s elaborate and richly painted still lifes were extremely sought after. In a series of paintings in the mid 1980s he often took inspiration from the objects that surrounded him in his studio – the tools of his trade. They are, in themselves, very humble items; worn brushes, a jar of white pigment, an old copper saucepan which he would use to prepare size, when priming his canvasses. But in the way that Alexander Goudie painted them, each object is afforded an extraordinary, sculptural presence. The handling of the paint displays a mastery of confident and economical brushwork. Just enough detail is given to summon up each object and the palette of colours deployed is both subtle and precisely modulated. The overall effect is an image which, for me, resembles a kind of painter’s altar – a profound and powerful tribute to the artist’s craft. Lachlan Goudie
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.’
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