Following a 10-day vacation in Mauritius a few years ago, the artist Lachlan Goudie who was born in Glasgow, knew he had to go back to paint the island’s beautiful scenery.
“L’homme propose, Dieu dispose.”
The pandemic thwarted his plans for an early return. Little did he know that it would be four years before he saw this beautiful tropical island again in 2022.
Goudie is no stranger to travel. He resides and works in London and frequently exhibits in New York, London, Edinburgh, and other international cities. Given that his mother is French, his family spent considerable time in Brittany. Art flows in his veins. His father, Alexander Goudie (1933–2004), was regarded as one of the finest portrait painters in Scotland and even painted the late Queen Elizabeth II.
Lachlan studied English at Christ’s College, Cambridge, before graduating from Camberwell College of Arts with a degree in fine art. However, he attributes his knowledge of painting and respect for artists such as Matisse and Gauguin to having watched his father paint as a child.
It did occur to him that, like Paul Gauguin, painting had led him to this beautiful island in the Indian Ocean, while Gauguin had gone to Tahiti in the Pacific Ocean.
After four years of waiting, his creative mode kicked in the moment he set foot on Mauritian soil. The house where he stayed in Calodyne, in the northeast of the island, was on the edge of a beach, and he considered himself fortunate to be able to watch the fishermen leave each morning before beginning to sketch. The rest of the day was spent drawing the lush vegetation, coastal scenery, and abundant flora and fauna of his new environment. In the evenings, he painted the glowing sunset in gouache, which is a type of opaque watercolour.
For Goudie, Mauritius was an artist’s paradise. The weather was a radical departure from “dreich,” the word used by the Scottish people to describe the dreary weather there. This new environment inspired him to use vibrant, saturated colours, and his attention to detail was heightened. He concentrated on the various components of the exotic flora he observed on a daily basis. In contrast to the majority of people, his gaze was drawn to the frond, the petiole, the rachis, and the leaflets of the palm tree.
It was a good time to reflect on his trip to Mauritius when he was back to his London studio with over seventy sketches in his portfolio. He started work on recreating his experience on canvas with acrylic and oils. In addition to seeing the light and colours in his paintings, he would like the viewer to hear the bird songs, the sound of a breeze in the trees, and the crashing of the waves, to be inspired.
While preparing for his Painting Paradise exhibition at the Scottish gallery in Edinburgh, which featured paradisiacal scenes from Mauritius, Goudie was chosen as one of six artists to document Queen Elizabeth’s lying-in-state at Westminster Hall in London. Approximately 200,000 people paid their last respects to the deceased queen in September, and Lachlan’s drawings have become both a historical record and an artistic expression of that moment.
Author of the book The Story of Scottish Art, Lachlan was dubbed “a creative to watch” by The Times’s Luux magazine and became a full member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 2013.
If he weren’t an artist, he said he would be a film director. With hands-on experience writing and presenting his own art series for the BBC, who knows, maybe Lachlan Goudie will make a documentary about Mauritius in the near future.
Mylene Lamy