Alan Gouk, who has died from cancer aged 84, was an ambitious abstract painter and an eloquent and passionate writer, committed to the continuing power of modernism. For many years he taught sculpture at St Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins, part of the University of the Arts London). He was primarily influenced by American abstract expressionism, although became conscious of the European basis of his art – his personal lodestars were the painters Henri Matisse, Hans Hofmann and Patrick Heron.
A job as exhibition officer to the British Council in the early 1960s provided Alan with a crucial introduction to the London art world. In 1967 he was recommended by the sculptors Anthony Caro, Phillip King and Isaac Witkin to be chair of the sculpture forums at St Martin’s, where students and professional artists would present and fiercely debate their work.
In 1970 he became head of the advanced sculpture course at St Martin’s and in 1981 senior lecturer in sculpture. Working with the head of sculpture, Tim Scott, Alan was involved in a controversial and short-lived rethinking of sculptural education centred on an intense study of the body. He retired from St Martin’s in 1990.
During the second half of the 70s, Alan took part in the artist-run studio exhibitions at Stockwell Depot in south London, bastions of modernist abstraction as it became increasingly marginalised. His inclusion in an exhibition of four London-based Scottish painters at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in 1977 led him to quarrel with the American critic Clement Greenberg, one of a number of Alan’s public disagreements with dominant art-world figures.
Alan held his first London solo exhibition in 1987, showing subsequently with Flowers Gallery, Poussin Gallery and most recently Felix & Spear. I met Alan at Poussin and our conversations were an important part of my introduction to modern painting and central to my research on Stockwell Depot. I wrote three short essays on his paintings, most recently for Hampstead School of Art in 2022.
Born in Belfast, Alan was the son of Grace (nee McElhinney), a nurse, and Ronald Gouk, a commercial traveller. In 1944, when he was a young child, the family moved to Glasgow, where he attended Hutchesons’ grammar school. His studies in architecture, in Glasgow and London, and psychology and philosophy, in Edinburgh, were not completed. Following his father’s early death, in 1963 Alan committed himself to painting.
He was twice a winner of the John Moores Painting prize, in 1967 and 2002. In 1987 the Tate acquired his Cretan Premonition. Other paintings are held by the Arts Council of Great Britain, the British Council and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
His first marriage, to Margaret Emburey, ended in divorce in 1967. He met Patricia Guy in 1968 and they married in 1984, living in Stroud, London and Ramsgate. Alan maintained his primary studio in Montrose, on the coast between Dundee and Aberdeen, generally living there alone for half the year in a flat that was once part of a house owned by his great-grandfather.
He is survived by Patricia, three children – Paul from his first marriage, and Alexis and Sholto from his second – and six grandchildren.
