Joan Eardley, RSA

The Artist's Studio, Glasgow (EE316);
Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow;
Private Collection

The board is sound. There are circular pin holes to the extreme edges and corners of the board. There are some area of very minor paint loss to the centre of the right edge, to the lower left corner and to the lower edge which could all be intrinsic tot he work. There are some light surface scratches to the sky area and some dripped pigment in the upper right section which are likely to be intrinsic to the work. On close inspection there are some extremely minor scuff marks and abrasions to the extreme edges and corners which could be intrinsic to the work. Otherwise the work is in good original condition and ready to hang. Ultraviolet light reveals no sign of retouching. Held in a simple wooden frame in fair condition.
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Catterline, a small isolated fishing village on the extreme north-eastern coast of Scotland just south of Stonehaven, became a 'home from home' and a favourite subject of Eardley's work throughout the 1950s. Eardley found great affinity with the brutal physicality of nature and its inherent elemental energy which surrounded her and her studio at Catterline; undoubtedly an added attraction was her own primitive dwelling which lacked not just electricity but inside sanitation and running water, enhancing her unfettered experience of nature which she reflected in her painting. Eardley tended to paint these landscapes either from sea level or from the cliff-top looking dramatically out across the rocky shoreline to the bleak North Sea as in the current work. The Catterline landscapes possess a powerfully dark palette based on blue, green and black which directly reflects the often brooding storm clouds and rough seas which Eardley so loved to paint. In the current work we see unusual bursts of vibrant colour, predominantly red, which punctuate the landscape and the shore.

Eardley's unconventional method of painting during raging storms in which both she and her board, clamped to the easel and weighted with stones to combat the wind, would be exposed to repeated lashings of rain, displays her fascination with wild seas and the visual grandeur of storms. The result was a body of work that possessed an acute sense of truth and urgency which is extremely rare. Following her one-woman show at Roland, Browse and Delbanco in London in 1963, the year of her tragic early death to cancer, Eric Newton writing in The Guardian eloquently states that "Joan Eardley is surely one of the few artists of today about whom one can honestly say that her heart is the core of her experience and that the nature of her experience is vastly more important to her than the way she paints it. And yet the texture of her paint, the impetuous brushstrokes, the gradations of colour and sudden explosions of dramatic light are exactly what they ought to be."