HIDDEN FIRES THE OVERLOOKED GENIUS OF JOAN EARDLEY She depicted

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Oct 21, 2007 | by Alan Taylor

AS the summer of 1963 ripened into autumn, a train carried Joan Eardley from Aberdeen to Glasgow. It was to be the artist's last journey. The breast cancer which she had neglected to have treated for so long, had progressed alarmingly and spread to her brain, causing blinding headaches and double vision. Eardley, who had always been burly, had lost a lot of weight and was very weak. Accompanying the painter were Angus Neil, her protege, and her mother, Irene. Her sister, Pat Black, travelled separately by car.

When the train stopped at Stonehaven, friends from the nearby village of Catterline, where Eardley had lived for more than a decade, were able to board briefly and bid her farewell. They knew, as she surely did, that she did not have long to live.

In Glasgow, she was taken to Killearn Hospital.

There, she asked her friend, Audrey Walker, whose photographs make an incomparable record of the artist at work, to read her Ernest Hemingway's short story, The Snows Of Kilimanjaro, in which, ironically, a dying writer refuses to let his wife read to him. "I don't like to leave anything, " says the man. "I don't like to leave things behind." Not long afterwards, on August 16, Eardley died. She was 42.

What Joan Eardley left behind was an astonishing and varied body of work, comprising more than 1000 drawings and several hundred paintings which the National Galleries of Scotland is celebrating with a major if belated exhibition that opens next month in Edinburgh. Its timing is fortuitous. Prices for Eardley's paintings are soaring and dealers, such as Guy Peploe, owner of Edinburgh's Scottish Gallery, are actively soliticiting private owners in the hope of persuading them to sell. Paintings which Eardley herself would have been happy to sell for GBP25, now fetch tens of thousands of pounds above their estimated price. Recently, Peploe sold an Eardley painting for GBP85,000. A few years ago, the same work would have fetched GBP15,000 at most. "Her star is very much in the ascendant, " he says.

Critically, too, Eardley is at last being accorded the respect and appreciation her work demonstrably deserves. Even within Scotland that was not always the case, recalls Cordelia Oliver, Eardley's art-school contemporary and biographer. When she tried to persuade the National Galleries to host a retrospective in 1988 to mark the 25th anniversary of Eardley's death, she was given the brush-off.

According to Oliver, Timothy Clifford, then director of the National Galleries, gave the impression he didn't know who she was or didn't care. In the event, the exhibition went ahead to effusive reviews at the Talbot Rice Gallery and the Royal Scottish Academy.

At this distance, when it seems obvious that Eardley's paintings are likely to survive the rigours of time, such indifference is curious not to say perverse. For even as she lay grievously ill, Eardley was able to read critiques of a show in London in which she was mentioned in the same breath as Turner, Goya and Renoir.

"Like Turner, " wrote Eric Newton in the Manchester Guardian, "she paints as though the brush were an integral part of her personality that found no difficulty in expressing, in a kind of shorthand of its own devising, the way to say 'cloud' or 'tangle of grass' or 'mop of hair'. 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 convey." For Eardley, says Pat Black, art was a calling above all others. "It was her life, " she says emphatically, sitting in her Glasgow bungalow. "There was nothing else." Listening to her reminisce about her sister, one is reminded of Van Gogh, one of Eardley's heroes, whose letters to his brother Theo she read as if they were addressed personally to her. "What some consider working too fast, " wrote Van Gogh, "is really nothing out of the ordinary, the normal condition of regular production, seeing that a painter really ought to work just as hard as, say, a shoemaker." Such sentiments, says Cordelia Oliver, would have been cheered by Eardley. "We never thought of ourselves as artists, " she says. "We were painters." By which she doesn't mean they were not people apart; rather, that they had a special talent, a gift whose origin defies tracing. That Eardley was unusually accomplished was apparent to Oliver, who met her at the Glasgow School of Art in the early 1940s. What was equally apparent was the strength of Eardley's desire.

"There is no doubt that among us, in those wartime years, Eardley acted as pace-setter, " notes Oliver. "She was in another class entirely. In no sense was hers an easy, effortless accomplishment.

What gave her work its power and its presence was her absolute commitment to its demands, and the sheer, dogged persistence in study through drawing, in gaining knowledge through the eye." It was the war that drew Eardley to Glasgow. Contrary to received chauvinism, she was not born in Scotland but on a farm at Warnham in Sussex. It was 1921 and she was the first child of Captain William Eardley, a young English officer who, while billeted at Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow during the first world war, had met and subsequently married a local girl called Irene Morrison.