Tim Goulding: VI Decades at Taylor Galleries, Dublin

Before he picked up a paintbrush professionally, Tim Goulding picked up a recorder and joined Dr. Strangely Strange. For three years in the late 1960s, he toured Ireland and Europe with the experimental folk group whose Heavy Petting (1970) remains one of the most beguiling albums of its era, reissued by TLAK as a 55th Anniversary Edition in 2025. Phil Lynott and Gary Moore were regular visitors to the band's shared Dublin house, which Lynott liked enough to name Thin Lizzy's second album after it: Shades of a Blue Orphanage.

But Goulding traded velvet for canvas. He left the band, left Dublin, and drove as far west as Ireland would let him, settling in Allihies on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, where he has lived and painted ever since. Over the following six decades, he has become one of Ireland's most quietly important artists: elected to Aosdana, represented Ireland at the 1971 Paris Biennale, and placed work in the collections of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Crawford Gallery, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Now 81, Goulding is the subject of a major retrospective at Taylor Galleries in Dublin. VI Decades: Paintings 1964–2026 spans the full arc of his career, from early landscapes rooted in West Cork's rugged coastline and copper mines to recent abstract works constructed like musical scores, with attention to counterpoint, harmony, and rhythm.

The timing feels right. Dr. Strangely Strange have been anything but quiet lately: their Anti-Inflammatory, released on TLAK in 2025, was the band's first new studio album in over half a century and drew rave reviews. A "little sit down" tour of Ireland and London followed. Word is the gallery walls may not be the only things making music on Kildare Street this summer.

"Music has been my nurse," Goulding once said, "and art my doctor."

VI Decades opens July 16 and runs through August 22 at Taylor Galleries, 16 Kildare Street, Dublin 2. More at timgoulding.com.