Tom Gourdie (1913 - 2005)
"My now large collection of sketches, whatever their merit as works of art, must have some value as records"
Tom Gourdie - The Scots Magazine, January 1974
Tom Gourdie MBE., DA., FSSI (1913-2005) studied at Edinburgh College of Art during the 1930s.
Although he subsequently achieved international recognition as a calligrapher, lecturer, and author of books on the teaching of handwriting, he was also an accomplished artist.
While still at school in the mining town of Cowdenbeath, Fife, in the late 1920s, he experimented with the recording of local scenes with particular reference to the industrial architecture of the many coal mining buildings which existed locally.
After war service in the RAF, Tom taught art at Banff Academy in 1946-47 before returning to Fife as an art teacher at Kirkcaldy High School. He remained at Kirkcaldy High until early retirement in 1973 to pursue, full-time, his main interests - calligraphy and the promotion of the teaching of handwriting.
This site displays his many paintings of subjects from the 1940s and 1950s (as well as some of his calligraphy - Shakespeare Sonnets etc - and ink drawings) covering subjects such as Kirkcaldy, Burntisland, Lochgelly, Kinghorn, Banff, Ceres, Falkland, Dalgety Bay, St David's Harbour, Leslie, West Wemyss, Dunbar, St Abbs, Anstruther, Leuchars, Orkney and Scalloway (Shetland).