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Conversations with Joan by Kate Downie is a tribute to artist Joan Eardley, focusing on themes of childhood and creativity. Through words and artwork, Downie explores the emotional journey of finishing Eardley’s incomplete painting, Two Children, blending the past with the present. This book accompanies Kate Downie: Conversations with Joan, a solo exhibition at Glasgow Womens Library. Read a short snippet by clicking the button below.
Born in North Carolina, Kate Downie studied at Grays School of Art in Aberdeen before travel and residencies took her to the United States, England, Amsterdam and Paris. Over the past two decades Downie has established herself as one of Scotland’s most prominent artists. Her skill not restricted to painting alone, she works across a diverse range of artistic medium. One recent project for Pittenweem Arts Festival saw Kate juxtapose large colour-field prints with architectural charcoal drawings with extraordinary results. The majority of her work is defined by geography, and the artist’s response to the landscape or subject in front of her. Kate’s constant search for new challenges and inspirations has seen her set up studios in such diverse places as a brewery, an oil rig, and for her most recent show an abandoned Hydroponicum. Her work is held in many public collections including Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art; Kelvingrove, Art Gallery: Reitveld Kunst Academie, Amsterdam; the BBC and Edinburgh Council. Downie has enjoyed ten solo exhibitions at The Scottish Gallery. She is currently exhibiting at the Glasgow Women’s Library with Conversations with Joan. An exhibition based around Downie’s creative journey to complete a version of Joan Eardley’s painting Two Children left unfinished on her Townhead Studio easel at the time of her death in 1963.
In August 2025 I travelled with my partner by rail and ship to the archipelago of Shetland for the first time to meet with fellow artists and explore the contrasting geology and grasslands of this beautiful place.
Towards the end of our Shetland journey, we visited Peter Davis, the watercolourist nonpareil, who kindly guided us to the edge of his walkable land. We found ourselves teetering upon the cliffs at Silwick absorbing the full sun and the shimmering blue infinity of the ocean, keenly feeling the heady risks, the contrasts of substance and absence beneath our feet.
Peter confessed his preference for wilder days of storm and ambiguous light filtered through cloud and fleeting weather patterns which he expresses so beautifully in his veiled washes of colour, whereas I am perhaps more responsive to the raucous play of the wind & water upon this rugged land. Happily, we had much in common; our shared experience as artists, our mutual appreciation of certain painters who had altered our sense of what painting could be, how they interpreted the land through their vision: Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis,
Georgia O’Keeffe, those mid-20th Century pioneers of open spaces and imagination. There we were, made tiny by the grand craggy cliffs, walking and talking art and the pleasure of moving amongst this giant land: the turf of Silwick’s eroded edges with plunging depth to our left and the brave calligraphic grasses clinging to the tops of the vast rocky shard-islands as the tides swirled below
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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