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framed dimensions: 111 x 111 cm
signed verso
EXHIBITED:
Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London; Joan Eardley Memorial Exhibition, The Arts Council of Great Britain, Scottish Committee, 1964
Painted in the days between summer and autumn of 1962, A Field by the Sea No. 1 captures a moment of quiet transition in Eardley’s Catterline landscape. The harvest is underway, hedgerows still abundant but beginning to retreat under the first bluster of autumn storms. Expanses of vibrant green and luminous turquoise dominate the composition, evoking a raw intensity and clarity of light. These colours pulse with energy, suggesting both the physical vitality of the land and the emotional urgency with which the artist worked.
In the following summer of 1963, the artist, facing the final months of her life, continued to paint from her cottage studio, supported by friends who brought her wildflowers as subjects. Cancer, which had shadowed her for two years, was nearing its toll, yet her creativity remained undiminished. There was a blazing urgency in her final paintings and A Field by the Sea is among them, revealing a light that burned intensely, with absolute conviction and purpose. This painting was acquired from Roland, Browse & Delbanco and featured in the Arts Council Memorial Exhibition of 1964, held in recognition Joan Eardley’s extraordinary contribution to 20th century art.
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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