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The late William Feaver described Eardley’s seascapes as spuming escarpments. We can recognise these in Winter Sea II, breakers rolling into the tight bay, dissipating their energy on its adamantine rock features, casting their spray onto the foreshore where the artist has planted her board to the east of Catterline’ s pier. It is winter and a gale has blown up, the dark rimmed sun already low in the west, still bright in the broken clouds. The gestural stroke of red indicates a beached boat, likely local fisherman Alec Craigie’s Fear Not, which has been pulled high above the churning surf. Eardley provides structure for her drama of sea and storm, the familiar features of the black rocky coast framing the crashing waves, her composition opening to the south with the rock finger sitting below the dark eye of the storm, described with sweeping brushstrokes.
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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