Joan Eardley - Landscapes

Picture the scene if you will: storm tossed seas pounding the shingle beach, spray hanging so thick in the air you could be in the middle of a blizzard, lightening piercing the maelstrom and wind howling demonically around your body, chilling you to the bone. A pleasant picture no? Even the thought of it is making me curl deeper into my cashmere… Brrr! 

Now I love a potter into the great outdoors as much as the next girl, in fact I really do enjoy tootling around amidst nature in all her storm whipped splendour, when the wind steals your breath before you can even draw it and being drenched is just par for the course. Even intrepid little me might quail slightly about getting so up close and personal to a storm on the beach though, especially when I was blatantly the tallest and most electrically conductive thing around… Luckily for us though, there are people who are so passionate about capturing the true nature of a storm that they’ll throw caution to the wind (pardon the pun) and just straight in. Joan Eardley was one of these adventurous souls and her Landscape works are a tribute to the combination of passion of a woman and the power of Nature.

The Wave, 1961. Oil and Grit on Board. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

Last December I was cast adrift in Eardley’s urban landscape of the Glasgow Gorbals, with her children and their poverty as my company. In the same afternoon I was swept away yet again, but this time it was to the wide and wild expanses of the Scottish country around Catterline to the south of Aberdeen. Now in my memory the whole span of that time is rather rose-tinted and gooey (read cringing for everyone else) so I was quite prepared to put my reaction to the work down to romantic fancy, but even now, some six months later I’m still enthralled by the combination of power and passion which characterise this Landscape work. It is just as strong as the Figurative but concentrates more on the fleeting nature of great untouched landscapes, rather than the transitory nature and impressions of the humanity Eardley surrounded herself with, and which some find it easier to associate with.

Summer Fields, c.1961. Oil and Grasses on Board. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Eardley always painted with an eye for detail. She had a talent for immersing herself in the world that she was capturing, and taking the viewer along with her, saturating us all in her style, her love of colour and her passion for what she saw. She also had a knack for capturing a moment in time to perfection – something which has only truly been recognised with the fifty or so years of hindsight we have accrued since her death. The urban and country landscapes that she immortalised represented a way of life which was slowly and irrevocably disappearing. If we look at her images painted in and around the tiny village of Catterline during the 1950’s and 60’s, they show a way of life no longer seen in the modern world. Whilst there are indications of humanity in the houses and fishing nets and beehives, there is nothing that suggests modernity and the encroachment of technological advancements. Indeed, whilst the world at that time was seemingly swept up by a storm of new freedom, consumerism and social bonhomie, Eardley was known to race north at the ring of a phone to capture a storm of the natural variety in all its uncaring, inhuman and timeless glory. She knew her landscapes were slowly disappearing around her, she took it upon herself to capture every subtlety in colour throughout the season, every grade of the light along the shore, safe in the knowledge that it was but a fleeting second to be cherished.

Beehives, Approaching Storm, c.1950's. Oil on Board. By Kind Permission of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Edinburgh.

There are those who would contest that the Landscape images are nowhere near as alive as those of the Glasgow street children, I personally would argue that they are just as full of vim and vigour, just wholly more understated in the execution. The best (and most modern) comparison I can make would be to liken R&B to Soul music – they come from the same place in the music culture, it is just the way in which we interpret them and which moves us the most that determines our favourite. Indeed, I can honestly say that the Landscapes are my personal favourites because there is just so much going on within each composition in terms of subject and the way in which each has been lovingly constructed. There is something of the American and European post-war abstract scene echoing through the works Eardley produced during the mid-late 1950’s. It is in her physical interaction with her medium and in her experimentation with adding grass and flowers to her canvas to build texture and bring a greater sense of place to the images which I particularly enjoy. She has spread paint on with a palette knife in some instances, drawn into the wet paint with her brush end and dribbled wet pain down her foregrounds.

Foam and Blue Sky, 1962. Oil on Board. Collection of Henry and Sula Walton.
Whilst Eardley was certainly aware of the work of Kandinsky, Hartung and Soutine, I firmly believe that her work is sufficiently her own to say that she admire, but never felt the need to mimic, them.

There is an eloquence to every image in Eardley’s landscape portfolio which even the most verbose and flowery travel writer would struggle to replicate in describing the magnificent wastes, epic skies and the transition of the light in the coastal village which Eardley came to see as her second home. I find it staggering that I can smell the grasses, hear the crunch of fresh snow under foot and almost taste the salty tang in the air. After her untimely death at the age of just forty-two, one of Eardley’s tutors from her days at Glasgow School of Art, Hugh Adam Crawford, spoke movingly of her great artistic talent, and made what I consider to be a very telling remark about this woman and her work. Paraphrasing (as is my want) he intimated that she communicated with paint, she knew it’s language and what it could convey to a viewer and most importantly she knew how to do it. Eardley had few close friends, and she was known to be difficult and almost cold to those who she didn’t know. Give her a paint brush though and the feelings flow freely – love, loss, happiness, naivety, sadness… Life immemorial is Eardley’s beautifully painted gift to us all, more articulate and honest than words ever could be.

Catterline in Winter, c.1963. Oil on Board. Scottish National Gallery of Modern  Art, Edinburgh.

Joan Eardley - Glasgow Street Children

It’s funny the things we remember. For example, I remember being dressed in a cross-country biking helmet, oven gloves and some kind of jacket, then deposited in a pram to be backstop in a Christmas Day game of Cricket when I was in three years old (I should say that we were in New Zealand and strange things like that happen all the time…). I desperately wanted to play, but was judged to be too small and pathetic, so was swathed in ‘protective’ clothing and promptly had a ball hurled at me for several hours - I love my family.

Ah, the game of gentlemen... Or overly enthusiastic children

More pertinent to this thread however, is recalling the day I found Joan Eardley. It was the 27^th of December and I was on my way – via a night in London – to France for New Year. The weather was about as un-Christmas like as could be, namely grey and mild. I was staying with the Architect for the night before flying off for what I hoped would be a relaxing five day break – think Chalet, open fires, snow, good company and way too much alcohol…

A skiing holiday for a non-skier... Picture perfect and totally debauched

Now, for some reason it all gets a little Breakfast at Tiffany’s from here on in, but I’m a sentimental old bird and as such am easily (please!) forgiven for such flights of fancy. High above Old Street, I settled myself on an enormous bed with the fluffiest duvet and pillows known to man and a cup of tea and, quite frankly, lost myself to another world and time. The lowering skies and glassy towers of London slowly disappeared, just as dusk gently wipes away the colour from daylight. The streets below ceased to hum with the life I knew, and were replaced by the hitherto unknown places of Joan Eardley’s Scotland.

A typical example of the Gorbals - bleak, cold, desolate and brimming with inspiration...

This wonderful and utterly unique artist is best known for her depictions of the streets of Glasgow during the 1950’s and 60’s. In coming to know her work, I am deeply conflicted in my feelings towards the images; they are at the same time familiar and alien. I can picture myself there and yet I have absolutely no idea of what that life could be like, except I somehow can instinctively feel the chill wind, the thinness of clothing, the security and warmth of having my brothers and sisters surrounding me... This in essence is why Eardley is brilliant – she’s opens one’s eyes to a new world and makes it as much your home as her subject’s. They always say that if you want to know a man you should walk a mile in his shoes, and that, in pictorial form, is what Eardley has created through her body of Glasgow work.

Children in a Glasgow Back Street, 1959. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection.

Any image you can find of Glasgow, and especially the Gorbals, back in the 1950’s is about as bleak as you can get without losing all historical credibility, and yet it was this impoverished and seemingly hopeless environment which Eardley breathed love and warmth and humanity into. Much like one of her heroes Stanley Spencer did, she became a part of the society which she was to capture with her materials over the 20 years of her painterly career. Although their background were poles apart, Eardley felt a kinship with the people of Glasgow, and drew from them the uniting factors of family, friendship and vivacity which make her work accessible to viewers from all walks of life, placing us squarely into her world.

Some of the Samson Family, 1961. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection

Eardley’s gift though is making us, the viewers, do the equivalents of a double take – we look at the image, and then we begin to see the true picture. It is true that the images of her Glasgow children are beautifully constructed in often vivid colour and always with a sense of humour, but there is a darkness which cannot be glossed over. Derelict streets and hungry families still remain even when the sun shines, and whilst Eardley wanted to show that lightness, she was always aware of the cold and bleak nature of her surroundings. Aside from the surroundings in which her paintings are set, there is an extra facets to this shadowy alternate view – the lack of any kind of parental figure. The children are shown as wandering the streets alone or with their siblings; responsibility for the youngest thrust upon the eldest whilst they themselves are nothing but adolescents themselves. The compositions depicts the closeness of these relationships, the family unit at perhaps it most fractured but at its tightest all the same; the bonds between siblings keeping the children warm and safe in the desolation of the adult world. When adults are portrayed it is in a dark and almost dangerous environment of twilight and gritty realism. Her palette is markedly different and whilst the children are full of life and hope born from their nievity, the adults seem more weighed down by trouble and their individual demons.

Three Children at a Tenement Window, 1961. Gouache on Paper. The Eardley Family.

The Table, 1953. Oil on Canvas. The MacLeod Collection

The world Eardley was portraying was a finite one, and the creeping loss of it was something that she was keenly aware of. Her images of the children of the Gorbals have immortalised the place, the time and the characters that she surrounded herself with. Whilst the city may long ago have succumbed to modernisation, its history has been preserved through her work. She took the people to her heart, and over time they have reciprocated in kind. Perhaps the most glowing testament to this love of Eardley by the Scots was the number of people who attended the first major retrospective of her work following her untimely death – over 30,000 people attended in the first three weeks of the exhibition alone. It seems almost poignant that someone who dedicated her artistic life to painting a world which was disappearing was destined to do the same before her time. Those who knew her mourned her passing, and those who have come to know her do so still.

Glasgow Children, 1958. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection