Tim Goulding was born in Dublin in 1945. His appreciation of art might have been inherited from his father, Basil Goulding, a prominent Irish sportsman, businessman and avid art collector. After studying textile design at Konstfackskolan in Stockholm (after being awarded a two-year scholarship), Goulding turned to painting, with a preference for landscape-inspired subjects. Self-taught, he continuously moves between abstraction and figuration.
Stimulated by his surroundings (West Cork mainly), Goulding channels landscape and its motif through colour. Retrospectively, one can observe that his works are comprised of long-running series over several years on one core theme. Each creative pocket generates its own identifiable corpus, some of which can radically contrast in style and aesthetic. Nevertheless, common sources of inspiration can be found in nature, its colours and textures, from the rugged Irish coastlines and copper mines, to the wildlife that populate them. Through these elements, Goulding builds symbiotic contradictions of duality and oneness, material and spiritual, the figurative and abstract, the scientific and the poetic. Music composition informs the various stages of his pictorial process.
Since 2014, more ethereal and philosophical concepts have found their way in Goulding’s work. Energetic particles, veins, threads and used textile surfaces are materialised in art, all while being accompanied by sparse poems nodding to Japanese wabi-sabi and calligraphy focusing on self-realisation and the journey it represents.
Locally, Goulding has enjoyed solo exhibitions at the Catherine Hammond Gallery, Lavit Gallery and Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, while also being included in group shows at the National Gallery of Ireland, the Royal Hibernian Academy, Boyle Arts Festival and the annual Éigse Carlow Arts Festival. Internationally, the artist represented Ireland at the ‘Young Artists From Around the World’ exhibition in New York in 1970, at the 1971 Paris Biennale and the Cagnes-sur-Mer International Art Fair in 1977
Goulding is also an accomplished musician, and a member of the psychedelic lounge band Dr Strangely Strange.