Joan Eardley Centenary | The Media Response

A wee girl with a mop of red hair and squint in her eye seems to take her portrait-sitting seriously in One of the Samsons as does her sister in a sketch of her in a colourfully striped cardigan.

[Joan Eardley] shows how she was aware of the exciting work of her contemporaries, the French and American abstract painters, the collages Rauschenberg and the graffiti of Dubuffet, but she did not surrender to the siren song of abstraction to become just another feeble imitator. She stuck to her engagement with the world around her. In this she really was original.

Robertson's finished work certainly is very much a realisation of its inspiration, utterly recognisable in its explosion of wildflowers and grasses, and yet, as Robertson points out, the colours “not brighter, but more alive.” “It's a quality of wool. Paint reflects light, but wool absorbs it and resonates out, so it feels richer.”

Playing with collage and echoing the mark-making of chalked graffiti, Eardley recalls both cubism and the observant eye of the street photographer Brassaï, and she marries this with the characterful physical convolutions of Schiele. The result is a suite of drawings and paintings that are alive with childlike energy, and while there’s no denying that Eardley’s brand of social realism shies from the grimmer realities of slum life, it’s easy to see why the popularity of these playful works endures.

Across Glasgow and further afield in Scotland, events will be unfolding throughout this year and next in Eardley’s honour... in Edinburgh, the Scottish Gallery, which had a close relationship with the artist in the 1950s, is planning a centenary show to coincide with the Edinburgh International Festival; its director, Guy Peploe, echoes the sentiments of Lachlan Goudie in lamenting that it has taken ‘such a long time for her reputation to move out from Scotland’, and hoping that events here will lead to a wider reappraisal.