Peter Goodfellow — A singular artist

Peter Goodfellow — A singular artist
11.05.2016
Early Snow, Coigach   30 x 20 cm  oil on board  £925

 

‘I do not practice. I squeeze paint from tubes and apply this with brushes or palette knives to wood or canvas. The result is a painting. I paint’.

We have a collection of landscape paintings by Peter Goodfellow in our current exhibition. We first exhibited Peter’s work more than 20 years ago. At that time he was creating wonderfully colourful, engaging faux naive paintings but over time his work has changed and developed as he has become more interested in landscape, focusing almost entirely on landscape until he has become one of Scotland’s best known landscape painters.

Over the last few years a new direction has emerged featuring portraits and the urban environment and also satirical works.

 

Peter Goodfellow - Flow Country Snowmelt

Flow Country Sunset, Snowmelt  18 x 13 cm  oil on board  £500

 

Peter Goodfellow is an unusually skilled artist. He set out as an illustrator and learned the technical skills essential to his craft. He worked mainly in the field of book jacket, advertising and packaging design. With agents in New York, Hamburg and London he established himself as one of Europe’s leading illustrators. But at the same time as producing commercial work, he continued to produce his own paintings.

Peter has strong views on contemporary art and he is not afraid to voice them. He is ‘angry and embarrassed’ at what visual arts culture has become. He is saddened by the direction of art in Britain and in British art schools. ‘Traditional skills are no longer pushed at art college. Students are encouraged to have ‘concepts’.’

 

Treason of the Scholars

'Treason of the Scholars', available from Amazon

 

A major exhibition of his work was held in London in 2015; this was the product of 4 years work. To accompany the exhibition, Peter published a beautifully produced book ‘Treason of the Scholars’ — a collection of his own paintings and text with essays by Duncan MacMillan, David Starkey and Roger Scruton. The satirical works he created for the exhibition exhibit jaw-dropping technical skill and creative imagination. They are also hard-hitting, exposing the vacuous nature of much contemporary art. Philip Mould described the exhibition as ‘witty subversion combined with compelling realism’.

 

Winter Heights, Torridon

Winter Heights, Torridon  18 x 13 cm  oil on board  £500

 

Brilliantly painted, his realist studies are exceptional, exposing the shallowness and commercialism inherent in much acclaimed art. His mountain landscapes are quite different, they express his love of the highland landscape, of its power and changing beauty. They are painted in a looser style, in thickly applied, luscious oils, full of colour and movement. Only an artist who knows how to draw and how to paint could produce such work.

 

Blog by Joan Ross