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This beautifully illustrated book on artist Joan Eardley is published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of her birth in 2021. Joan Eardley, one of Scotland’s most loved artists, visited the coastal fishing village of Catterline in 1951 for the first time. It sparked a fascination that would last the rest of her life.
She made this village in north-east Scotland her home and found inspiration in the dramatic light and rapidly changing weather. The gentle landscapes and wild rolling seascapes she painted there in wind, snow, rain and sunshine are among her best-loved works.
Focusing on Eardley’s relationship with Catterline, this book includes previously unpublished archival material as well as specially conducted interviews with many of those in the village who knew her best, shedding new light on Eardley’s life and artistic practice. A vivid portrait is painted both of Eardley and of the village, showing the vital part Catterline played in her development as an artist.
This evocative story is beautifully illustrated with many of her most remarkable drawings and paintings.
About the author, Patrick Elliott is Chief Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. He has written extensively on modern and contemporary art and is the author of the highly successful National Galleries of Scotland books True to Life and Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place.
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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