Bruce Goold: master printmaker, artist, observer

Notable Australian master printmaker, artist and Palm Beach resident Bruce Goold sadly passed away on Monday 16 June 2025. Sometimes considered under-appreciated, Goold's prolific work spans decades and left an undeniable influence on contemporary Australian painters, illustrators, printmakers and designers including Reg Mombassa (Chris O'Doherty), Michael Bell, Gerry Wedd and others whose styles adopt the use of bold, vibrant colours, illustrative style, black flowing outlines and Australian cultural and landscape themes. Active since the 1970s, Bruce was known as a vibrant, creative character who developed his observations into an array of works during his career: prints, drawings, collage, fabrics, interiors, ceramics, murals, packaging and brand logos.

According to Australian Galleries’ Stuart Purves: "a visit Bruce’s studio at Palm Beach was to experience cultural chaos – beautiful tools of the trade of a printmaker all at hand, objects and specimens collected over decades and an air of things that mattered, resulting in a significant body of printmaking, painting, collage, assemblages, and textile design." 

Goold became highly regarded for his linocuts and his work encompassed innovative imagery. His printmaking and fabrics are especially beautiful and have become part of architectural and interior transformations in bespoke commissions for resorts, city clubs, restaurants and retail outlets in Australia and internationally. 

Alice Birrell, for Vogue Australia, wrote of Goold’s contemporary impact: "A designer who has picked up on this is Emma Mulholland, through her label Holiday. She uses ice-block brights and tropes like slogans that could have been swiped from a postcard, souvenir-like prints and graphic shapes that echo her forbearers: she name-checks Mombassa and Goold without being prompted. “They captured Australian culture and the beach and rural landscapes so perfectly,” she explains. “I’m a big fan of screen-printing and tie-dye over digital, just because it wears so much better and can be done on natural fabrics. I would like to see more of the older techniques coming back in.”

Bruce Goold was born in 1948 in Newcastle NSW Australia and attended Sydney Grammar School. In 1961 he attended National Art School in Newcastle and then National Art School in Sydney in 1965. By 1971 Goold joined the Yellow House in Potts Point, the artist collective and art space founded by artist Martin Sharpe.

After travelling throughout Asia, he settled in Sydney's northern beaches peninsula with wife Katie, and later his daughter Nancy was born.

“I was inspired by the images of Australian flora and fauna and the quality and power of the works by the best practitioners of the period: Thee Proctor, the Vortices, linocuts of Claude Flight's Grosvenor School, Vera Blackburn, Adelaide Perry and Eric Take. A standout was the bold woodcut of banksias by Margaret Preston, black ink on cream paper, toughly incised, redolent of the savage cones and serrated leaves after a bushfire.” Bruce Goold

Although he worked in Ireland and London in the 1980s, he returned to settle in Palm Beach by the 1990s and continued a prolific career spanning solo exhibitions, group exhibitions, commercial and government commissions. From the beach he continued to be inspired, and other creatives followed: “Brett and Wendy Whiteley had also rented the house next door. We visited them and Brett did drawings of the angophora and the Barrenjoey headland when not swimming and entertaining”.  Goold often relayed stories of inspired movie nights and rambunctious gallery shows held at the local Palladium Dance Hall. On a quiet street in Careel Bay, magpies, banksias and cockatoos continued to feature in his work. “I have a beautiful garden with diverse birdlife that continues to inspire me,” said Goold in 2021.

Goold’s work didn’t just cover his love for nature and the tropics he discovered around Australia and through travels in Asia. He used linocuts and other methods to convey serious, sometimes difficult subject matter too. His 2008 hand coloured linocut Pasha Bulkar depicts the moment the cargo ship ran aground on Nobbys Beach during a sea storm in 2007, complete with terrified crew going overboard. 

His surfer depiction in Shell Surfer (2010) could easily be dismissed as Mambo-esque consumer poster art with a surfer in silhouette against a blazing yellow sun and large shell. It can also be read as a reference to early Indigenous people of the Guringai area, and is one of the several silhouettes Goold created after being inspired by a shadow play called Penumbra, which features a key character being revealed to be an Aboriginal man, appearing against an intense sunset.

While his work was vast, Goold's most visible creations include the Sydney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival Poster and the 1988 Bicentennial Festival of Sydney Official Poster among his many notable poster commissions. On clothing, he created the much loved Mambo Loud Shirt series after Dare Jennings saw Goold’s work exhibited. His interiors, prints and fabrics can be seen at resorts like Capella Lodge, Lord Howe Island and other commissions included the logo identity for Southern Ocean Lodge, Palisade Hotel, Arthur’s Nightclub, Quay Restaurant and local Avalon Palm Beach Chamber of Commerce. When we consider how often one might have come across Goold’s work in daily life, especially in Sydney, we begin to realise he created an imprint of modernist Australiana that now lives in our collective consciousness. Moreover, he designed stunning fabrics; mosaics and murals for the Taj Wellington Mews Apartments in Mumbai, unique linocuts for the Sydney Town Hall Lord Mayor's Corridor, product labels for Brave Souls Wine and terrazzo floors and tiles for Darling Harbour among many other commissions.

Bruce Goold's work is held in private and public collections including Artbank, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Australian Museum, the Australian National Gallery, the Australian National Maritime Museum, Lord Howe Island Museum, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Powerhouse Museum, RACV Collection, Sydney Town Hall Collection, Victorian Museum of Performing Arts, Volkswagen Australia and Sydney Theatre Company.

Main Image credit: Photo by Nancy Goold, as featured in Vogue Australia.

Words by Kathryn Franco