Sandy Goudie 'I have always lived through my art'

His youthful bearing and apparel always belied his age. The large 1977 painting of the artist's family, with his children Budoc, Gwen and Lachlan (being nursed by his mother), is at once tender and boldly handled, but it also demonstrates courage in another sense. It was painted in the largest Victorian house of its period in Glasgow, which was to remain the Goudie family home and the centre of Goudie's entire career. This house was acquired when Goudie, in a gesture of considerable self-belief, had turned down the security of a full-

time teaching post at Glasgow School of Art. A truly magnificent painting still on the easel at the time of his death tells us very clearly that he was at the height of his powers, and that more, much more, was still to come.

Ever enthralled by the intricacies and possibilities of art, Goudie constantly thought through the solutions to pictorial problems - the problems of making a painting - in the daily practice of his craft. It was not by accident that his formidable technique evolved, economical and lavish at the same time. To an unusual degree, he is an example of an artist for whom the humbler discipline of craft was the means to salvation: technique was something that emerged, but was never applied. His care would extend to the whole process of making a painting, from the anticipation of stretching and priming the canvas to the unstinting attention paid to framing the finished work.

To his work he brought an exuberance and joie de vivre, a keen sense of the beauty of the world and of art: landscape, Brittany, Venice, the human (especially the female) form, the pleasures of the table, music and poetry. All these are celebrated in his work, with its many references to the life of the artist, to the work in hand, to the happiness of the day. It is often said that an artist's work reflects his temperament, but how often is it true, as it was of Goudie, that the work can be seen in the man? In a real sense, his life was his art. The transparency of his work results from its oneness with its maker. Or as the artist said, ''I have always lived through my art and, in a sense, to really taste life to the full, I am obliged to put a line round it.''

And elsewhere: ''Everything which excited my imagination had to be set down in pictorial terms.''

His career was indeed a ''longue et belle vie de peintre'', as Segonzac said of Fergusson. First escorted to Glasgow School of Art by his mother at the age of 15 (still in short trousers, but determined to become an artist), Goudie enormously enjoyed his years at the school, from 1950 to 1955. The school clearly felt the same way about its youngest student, who lifted an impressive collection of prizes including The Somerville Shanks Prize for Composition and The Newbery Medal. During this time, he first visited Paris

in 1953 and shortly after

receiving his diploma, went to Toledo and Madrid in 1957,

encountering the masterpieces of Manet, El Greco and Velasquez, which would all remain a lifetime inspiration. In 1956, he became a member of the Glasgow Art Club, where he found a stimulating circle of artists, including the late John Cunningham and the architect Jack Coia.

Through the Cunninghams, he met and married Marie-Renee Dorval in 1962, and so began the annual summer

visits to Mainee's native Brittany, which gave a new direction to his work.

New directions, plural: his studies of local people, the old women in their sabots and white headdresses familiar to us from the time of Gauguin, Emile Bernard and Serusier (illustrious predecessors of whom Goudie was of course well aware, although he

liked to point out that, while they had chosen Brittany

to escape the bourgeois monotony of city life, he was there because he was married to a local girl) are now prized as portrayals of a rapidly-

vanishing way of life.

In 1987-89, he executed the mural decorations commissioned by Brittany Ferries for their flagship, the SS Bretagne, and in 1998, he made a series of painted ceramic figures of Breton working people.These large new projects, complete

in themselves, also pointed

the way to later and equally ambitious schemes. Salome,

by Richard Strauss, was to be given at Scottish Opera

with designs by Goudie, but after much work, which

included the making of plaster models of the dramatis

personae, the scheme came to naught.

In 1996, exploring another area of the Celtic world, Goudie embarked on the cycle of mural-scale paintings illustrating his beloved Burns's ''Tam O'Shanter'', which through the generosity of a private benefactor has been presented to the MacLaurin Gallery in Alloway, where it is on permanent display. This, needless to say, is a tour de force : we know that Goudie loved the poem, and that he loved horses; but it is the confidence with which this quintessential colourist treats a nocturnal Gothic theme that is most impressive.

On the acquisition in the early 1980s of Augustus John's old studio in Tite Street, with Whistler's former studio next door, Goudie had a London base for his practice as a portraitist (his sitters included

the Queen for the Caledonian Club, the Duke of Hamilton and his old Paisley friend Billy Connolly.) Here he would

hold vernissages for an ever-widening circle of friends and collectors. He was a trustee of the Scottish International Educational Trust set up by Sir Sean Connery. But his family, his Glasgow studio and friends remained the centre of his life - in the time he could spare from painting! I offer, finally, an eye-witness account of the artist's first visit to Venice with Mainee, on the occasion of their 25th anniversary. It was late and I was about to catch the San Marco vaporetto, when suddenly there they were: a complete coincidence. They generously suggested a drink at Florian's. Bellinis, I seem to remember.

Alexander Goudie, artist; born November 11, 1933, died March 9, 2004.