Great Scots joan Eardley 1921-1963

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Dec 19, 1999

A WOMAN visiting a dentist in Glasgow's east end seemed to be having difficulty keeping still. She kept peering at something in the far corner of the surgery. Eventually the dentist asked what she was looking at. She indicated a small reproduction of a Joan Eardley painting, one of her famous studies of Glasgow urchins, on the wall. Not having marked this patient down as an art lover, the dentist asked her if she was familiar with Eardley's work. Oh yes, she replied, but she didn't know that it was possible to buy such a nice framed print. She just had a copy that she had cut out of the Evening Times.

The painting was of the woman and her sister, yellow-haired, chewing the piece of string Eardley gave little ones to keep them occupied as she sketched.

In her short life, Eardley painted many such children in all their snotty-nosed glory. Later, as her preoccupations became less urban and she spent more time in the north-eastern fishing village of Catterline, she spent more time on landscapes, seascapes and the dramatic weather. When she died of breast cancer, aged 42, she was just starting to be recognised outside Scotland and had, finally, been elected a full member of the Royal Scottish Academy.

Although Eardley is considered a Scottish artist, she was born in Sussex and first studied art at Goldsmith's College, London. But her Scottish mother and grandmother moved to Bearsden in 1940; 19-year- old Joan came with them and she enrolled at Glasgow School of Art. There, she was encouraged by the head of drawing and painting Hugh Crawford. She also met Margot Sandeman, who was to be a life-long friend. The pair holidayed together in Corrie, on the Isle of Arran, where Eardley sketched and painted. One of her first sales was a drawing of a row of Corrie cottages in pen and ink and scumble colour. It was exhibited in Daly's department store and made eight guineas.

Eardley gained her art school diploma in 1944, when the options for women graduates were teaching or war work. A brief stint at Jordanhill teacher training college ruled out the former so Eardley found herself at a boat-building yard, working as a joiner's labourer, painting camouflage patterns onto the hulls of boats.

The war over, Eardley moved to London where she lived in penury, away from her family for the first time. She exhibited when she could, and found London an exciting place, but was affected by bouts of depression which were to dog her for the rest of her life.

During one of these black spells, she applied to Hospitalfield School of Art, a post-graduate summer school in Arbroath. As that was finishing she was awarded two scholarships to travel in Italy and France.

She returned to Glasgow with a sketchbook full of promise. From her first studio, a fourth-floor room in Cochrane Street, she started painting the street scenes and especially children. It was a period of stability: she spent a long summer in France and made friends with another artist, Dorothy Steel. In a new, better studio, above a corner shop at St James's Road, Townhead, she continued to work with the bold children of this teeming tenement neighbourhood. One family, the Samsons, were particular favourites and cross-eyed ginger-haired Pat is visible in several canvases. She also painted her friend Angus Neil in various poses, including naked, asleep, causing a minor sensation when it was exhibited at the Glasgow Institute in 1955.

Eardley discovered Catterline, the village that would be the subject for her finest works, by accident. She fell ill with mumps while in Aberdeen and was taken out for a drive while recuperating. Catterline is an unspoilt, inaccessible little place with an ancient feel, open to the sea, almost hidden from the road. She started spending time there and, with Angus Neil's help, converted a low, two- roomed cottage into a primitive studio.

As the studio in Catterline became more viable, Eardley spent more time there. Her health was never good - she had persistent problems with her back and neck - yet she was out working in even the most ferocious of weathers, a striking figure in her ex-RAF flying suit and clumpy boots, or heavy sweater. The fields, the cattle, the rows of cottages with washing drying and the sea were her subjects and she seemed to find life with no running water and the foul weather challenging, even stimulating.

When she became too unwell to live alone in such conditions, Eardley moved to a more comfortable cottage in the village. She continued working to the end, painting vases of flowers when she could not get outside to sketch landscapes. As the cancer progressed, spreading from her breast to her brain, she was finally getting the recognition that had eluded her for so long. She was, on her deathbed, acknowledged as an important British artist.

Since then, her status has grown. As she is not part of an identifiable group, movement or trend, her work has always stood on its own merit. Many Scottish municipal galleries own Eardleys and the Tate finally bought one, the seascape Salmon Net Posts, in the Eighties. The fact that she was a woman who often painted children possibly allowed the more jaundiced critics to write off her other work. Yet it is these later works, done in Catterline, which qualify her as a painter of world class. One critic, writing in the year of her death, summed her up: "Like Turner, she paints as though the brush were an integral part of her personality ... No slickness here, no tricks, no elegance. Just a trial and error attempt to invent the painterly equivalent of what she so intensely wants to say."