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Eardley will have made her way down to the water’s edge in the late afternoon, picking her way over the rocks and creels in the fading winter light. Her viewpoint is to the east of the pier close to the small salmon bothy, looking back towards the long sweep of cliffs, leading towards the headland and the silhouette of Todhead Lighthouse. The distinctive geographical features of Catterline’s rocky bay frame her scene, with the boulder like structures of ‘Kale Tap’ and ‘Dunning Woof’ lying in shadow against the backdrop of dark hill. The tide is high, and Eardley paints from the edge of the surf with the North Sea swell throwing foam over submerged rocks. The subject is the intense sunset, piercing the brooding sky like a line of fire which illuminates the shallow water in a pink and violet light. This painting was gifted by the artist to her friend and Catterline resident Annette Stephen (née Soper), who first introduced Eardley to the area in 1951, later marrying local fisherman ‘Big’ Jim Stephen. Painted between 1960 and 1963 and relating closely to its sister work in the collection of the City Art Centre, Sunset over Catterline shows Eardley at the height of her expressive powers, the full potential of her visual language realised to harness the immediacy of her experience.
There is an enduring fascination for Joan Eardley far beyond her unconventional life and early death at the age of forty-two. Born in 1921 in Sussex, Joan Eardley’s family moved to Scotland in 1939 and a year later she joined the Glasgow School of Art. She found subjects in the shipyards of Clydebank and the slums of Townhead, at first the run-down tenements and buildings and later the children and streetlife around Rottenrow where the character of the people and the place became the vital subject of her work. Her art education was finished with scholarship visits to Paris and the cities of Renaissance Italy and back in Scotland she ventured with her art school friends to Arran and back to the south of France. By the fifties, Joan Eardley divided her life between her studio in Townhead and the fishing village of Catterline, a place she had discovered in the North East of Scotland. Eardley felt at ease in these two contrasting localities and over the succeeding decade, as if by accident, she created an epic vision of the world from no more than two streets and one small fishing hamlet. The slums of Townhead are no more, the harsh realities memorialised by the honesty of her vision, the spirit of the people invested in its children captured, enduring like no other example in the history of art. Catterline remains unchanged and the village is inevitably a place of pilgrimage for the thousands who admire the artist’s deep-felt engagement with nature on the Kincardineshire coast. The Scottish Gallery held its first Joan Eardley exhibition in 1955 and later her memorial in 1964.
The Scottish Gallery exhibitions:
1955 (Festival), 1958 (Festival), 1961, 1964 (Festival and Memorial), 1981, 1983, 1984, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1996, 2007, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2021 (Centenary)
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