Tim Goulding: Squaring the circle when art and music connect

The Beara-based artist toured as part of folk-rockers Dr Strangely Strange, and there are plenty music references in his current exhibition in Cork

Tue, 22 Mar, 2022 - 08:30

Marc O’Sullivan Vallig

As a young man in the 1960s, Tim Goulding had two great passions: art and music. For three years, he toured Ireland and Europe with the cult folk-rock band Dr Strangely Strange, before decamping to the Beara peninsula in West Cork to dedicate himself full-time to painting. The 'Strangelies', all of them now in their seventies, still perform from time to time, and Goulding continues to compose music.

But art is what has sustained him over the past five decades, and it remains his principal activity. Goulding’s new exhibition at the Lavit Gallery in Cork combines his interests, however, featuring as it does a suite of paintings under the title Music. “The paintings hark back to the training in classical music I had as a child,” he says. “Up to the age of 15 or so, I was listening to Beethoven and modern jazz, and reading the Oxford Book of Music.

“In many ways, these new paintings are like music scores. In a lot of them, the staves go across from left to right, and the patches of colour are like notes hanging off them. I’ve envisaged orchestration, background singers and soloists; these are the solid colours upfront, and there’s usually four or five in each painting. I constructed the paintings as I might arrange a musical work, paying attention to counterpoint, harmony and the spaces between that imply rhythm.

“The paintings are Mozartian. I’m trying for a feeling of uplift, joy, and harmony. 'Singing with colour' is a good analogy.”

Throughout his career, Goulding has gone back and forth between landscape and abstract painting. “I’m just following my nose,” he says. “Painting is my diary, and wherever I’m at is expressed through the work.

“For this exhibition, I came in with 42 paintings, all of them made over the past four years, and the gallery has hung 23 for the show. They’re all painted in acrylics. I love oil paint, and the smell of the paint and the turps; I think that was the main reason I got into painting to start with. But later on, I found I was getting migraine headaches from the turps, so I switched over to acrylics for this series. I’ve done a lot of collage as well, layering Japanese paper on board, and painting over it.”

Goulding traces his interest in art back to his father, Basil Goulding, a dedicated collector who filled the family home on the River Dargle in Co Wicklow with contemporary paintings. “In a way, my dad was my teacher,” he says. “I never went to art college, but I remember we’d look through art magazines together. He’d buy realist and abstract paintings, it didn’t matter. ‘Quality within the genre,’ he said; that was his thing.”

Basil Goulding was probably the first to champion Camille Souter, now recognised as one of Ireland’s greatest painters. “I think Camille had the greatest influence on me as an artist, early on at least. I’d drive up with Basil to see her, at her home at Calary Bog. All these years later, we’re still in touch. She’s 92 now and lives on Achill Island, and the last time we spoke she talked about how much she’d love to visit Iceland again.”

The arts scene in Dublin was small and concentrated when Goulding was starting out in the 1960s. “There might be an opening at the Dawson Gallery, and you’d go from that to the next event somewhere else. There weren’t that many artists around - or collectors, for that matter - so you’d get to know everyone soon enough.”

When he played with Strangely Strange, they all shared a house they called the Orphanage. “Phil Lynott and Gary Moore were always calling around. Phil called his second album with Thin Lizzy ‘Shades of a Blue Orphanage'. And Gary played on a couple of our albums; he was a great friend, and the most amazing musician I’ve ever met.”

The original Dr Strangely Strange line-up, featuring Goulding, Tim Booth and Ivan Pawle, released two albums, Kip of the Serenes in 1969, and Heavy Petting in 1970, and reconvened to record a third, Alternative Medicine, with Joe Thoma in 1997.

“I’d find it acutely embarrassing to listen to those early albums now,” he says. “BP Fallon said our music was out of time and out of tune, but of its time. I can’t say we were ever successful as musicians. We were what they used to call a ‘name band’ in the music press. We were known. We were kind of a cult band. But we never got paid more than £1 a day.”

Goulding grew increasingly disillusioned with touring as the 1960s gave way to the ‘70s. “The music scene went from velvet to leather. In the Sixties, you’d make a pair of trousers out of a velvet curtain. But then, in the Seventies, a hardness came in. It was all leather and cocaine; the drugs got harder, and the music did too.”

He left the band, and Dublin, and escaped to West Cork. “I wanted to live in the country, and Allihies was as far as I could go, and a little bit further.” He refurbished an old schoolhouse, and lived there for some years before settling with his wife Georgina at his current home half a mile away.

The move to the country proved conducive to his success as an artist. Over the past five decades, he has had dozens of solo and group exhibitions; his work has been acquired for collections such as those of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Arts Council and the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork; and he was among the first wave of artists elected to the representative body Aosdána.

“Looking back now,” he says. “I think music has been my nurse, and art my doctor.”