Critics
Water Colour is the method which he adopts in preference to oil, without doubt because of the freedom, freshness of colour and fluidity which it allows. He bases his watercolours on rapid sketches which outline the landscape, suggesting these especially because they are not precise. There is in his work a vaporous quality which evokes a sense of poetry. And truly these are little poems; but the artist is not content with visions direct from nature; he likes to express himself in a more ethereal way, and the charm for us is not less because of this sort of abstraction, At the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, the artist exhibited two excellent works… ‘The Kirk on the Moor’ and ‘Waterfront, Port Seton’
By R Smith
Galerie Jules Salles, Nimes, France, 1951
‘La Revue Moderne’
‘La Revue Moderne’
TGM Guise in his watercolours uses a sort of Whistlerian pointilliste technique to indicate groups of figures, still lifes and abstract compositions, which hardly seem to exist at all first sight. With the longer look they gradually impose themselves upon the eye – the inner eye, for this painter is a mystic communicator – and exercise, at their best, an odd, withdrawn satisfaction, a brooding quietude.
They are at their best when their shapes are simplest, as in nos 3,5,6 and 15; the titles don’t matter in this case, being entirely subjective. His enemy is over- complication of design (as 2 or 11). This artist is an interesting quietist who probably appreciates another of his kind, Morandi, as well as Seurat and Whistler. In the same show his daughter, Lindy shows herself to be a very talented potter.
They are at their best when their shapes are simplest, as in nos 3,5,6 and 15; the titles don’t matter in this case, being entirely subjective. His enemy is over- complication of design (as 2 or 11). This artist is an interesting quietist who probably appreciates another of his kind, Morandi, as well as Seurat and Whistler. In the same show his daughter, Lindy shows herself to be a very talented potter.
By Sydney Goodsir Smith
Randolph Gallery, Edinburgh 1966
‘The Scotsman’ ‘Paintings for the inner eye’
‘The Scotsman’ ‘Paintings for the inner eye’
A quietist painter with a miasmic technique compounded of Seurat’s science and process-engraver’s precision, TGM Guise conjures from within his delicately tinted fogs a luminous imagery which is sometimes gentle, more often disturbing, always ambiguous.
By Felix McCullough
Randolph Gallery, Edinburgh 1966
‘The Evening News and Dispatch’
‘The Evening News and Dispatch’
Exquisite techniques are the order of the day – at the Randolph Gallery, where Tom Guise shows a series of faintly glowing, softly etched semi-abstracts in a kind of miniature pointillisme.
By Cordelia Oliver
Randolph Gallery, Edinburgh 1966
'The Guardian' 'Exhibition Roundup'
'The Guardian' 'Exhibition Roundup'
As with characters in a play by, for instance Beckett or Pinter, the figures in these paintings convey the impression of being engaged in disturbing ambiguous encounters. They provoke the imagination to supply its version of the lines of force that might be operating between them. Also, as in the Theatre of the Absurd, non-human objects take on human qualities: the still life figures having definite emotional vibrations.
By Michelle Stepto
Encina Gallery, Stanford University, Califiornia, August 1967
The technical procedures he adopts seem more important (to him) than the formal content they describe. He restricts the latter to a repetitive series of shapes that are abstract but organic enough to suggest still life objects or vague human forms, and these he disposes in an orderly manner, but without much tension or excitement.
Edward Gage
Randolph Gallery , Edinburgh 1968
‘The Scotsman’
‘The Scotsman’