The Scottish Gallery is staging an exhibition by painter and broadcaster Lachlan Goudie. Widely-known for his broadcasting work, including BBC One’s The Big Painting Challenge, as well as previous exhibitions, From the Forest to the Forge brings together, for the first time, work culled from over 15 years of drawing and painting in extraordinary industrial settings across the United Kingdom – from shipyards on the River Clyde, to blast furnaces in Wales and the high-tech satellite manufacturing laboratories in Portsmouth.
Visiting these sites over years, Lachlan has found inspiration in unlikely locations, and produced hundreds of drawings, paintings and prints. Viewed together, these images constitute an unusual picture-history of modern British industry, telling a story of national achievement, pride and technological innovation.
Goudie is one of a long line of British artists who have balanced inspiration from nature with portraying the manufacturing landscape, and the creative relationship Lachlan has forged with British industry has informed the making of two BBC documentaries: The Colours of the Clyde in 2014, which explored the work of Stanley Spencer in the Port Glasgow shipyards during the second world war, and Awesome Beauty – The Art of Industrial Britain in 2017, which investigated the legacy of British artists who, like Goudie, were inspired by industrial subjects.




