0 Joan Eardley

Nets and Salmon Cart, by Joan Eardley,1962

THIS FEATURE APPEARED IN THE HERALD ARTS SUPPLEMENT GALLERIES SECTION, WHICH I CURRENTLY WRITE EVERY WEEK, ON MARCH 30.

Joan Eardley

The Scottish Gallery

16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh

0131 558 1200

www.scottishgallery.co.uk

April 3-27

“I always identify Joan with the sea, and it is a valid identification. There is the gentle sunlit sea one delights in, in the summer. And even in bad weather it is still a summer sea. This was the Joan that I think everyone knew. This is the sea most people know. But there is the magnificent winter sea, in all its indomitable grandeur and the wild, turbulent and terrifying splendour. This was Joan too.”

These words were written about the painter Joan Eardley by her friend Audrey Walker, not long after she died in 1963, at the age of just 42.

As recently revealed in The Herald, Walker – a sheriff's wife and also a talented musician who gave up her career to raise her family – was also Eardley’s lover. 

This fact is not dealt with salaciously in a new book about Eardley, written by Christopher Andreae. It is in there as part of a bigger picture painted of a remarkable Scottish artist, along with Walker’s tribute which has never been published before. 

Most moving of all are letters written to Walker by Eardley on a daily basis when she was living and working in the north east coastal village of Catterline.

The letters are gentle and loving. (‘Dear dear you,’ she writes to Walker at one point, ‘I love you so much. It is often almost too painful to be away from you for so long.’

For my part, as a fan – and there are legions of us guarding her memory fiercely – reading them made me love Eardley more as an artist and as a human being.

Today, 50 years after her death, the passion which lies within Eardley’s paintings continues to fascinate viewers. 

Born in Sussex to a Scots mother and an English father, who was gassed in the first world war and who committed suicide when Joan was eight and her sister, Pat, was six, the all-female Eardley family moved to Bearsden following the outbreak of war in 1939.

She went on to be a star pupil at Glasgow School of Art. By the time of her death in 1963, her work was heading towards abstract expressionism and her work was being recognised outside Scotland.

In 2007, a major exhibition of her work at the National Gallery of Scotland (NGoS) wowed a new generation who came to her work for the first time.

In the large gallery space on The Mound, Eardley’s Catterline seascapes possessed a power which was almost bewitching. Viewers familiar with Joan Eardley’s portraits of Glasgow street kids from the 1950s and early 1960s suddenly saw this artist through fresh eyes.

This Wednesday (April 3), a new exhibition of Eardley’s work, the first major display of her paintings since the retrospective, opens in The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. 

This exhibition coincides with the publication of Andreae’s new illustrated monograph on Eardley and already, almost half the work has been sold.

This exhibition spans the full gamut of Eardley’s output, and features rare early works from her travels to France and Italy on travelling scholarships, studies of children in inner city Glasgow and on-the-spot paintings made in Catterline.

The late works in this exhibition hint at the artist she may have been had she lived.

The last year of her life was, in her own words, propelling her art towards the place which ‘hangs between reality and abstraction’.

Some of the work has not been seen in public since the 1964 memorial exhibition held by the Scottish Gallery, which had a close association with Eardley during her lifetime.

According to Christina Jansen, director of The Scottish Gallery, there are works on show which have never been seen in public before.

“These are really paintings which need to be seen on the walls,” she says. “Looking at Joan Eardley’s work online doesn’t compare to seeing it in front of you. She was not painting for anyone else; she was painting for herself. She could also do it on any scale – working with what she had in front of her.

“One of the wonderful things about the new book about Joan is hearing her voice. The way she writes is so unpretentious. There’s a bit in the book in which she talks about standing rooted to the spot, painting. Not moving; returning to it day after day, so that she made her own mark on the land, leaving her painting paraphernalia all around her. The way she describes it is almost cinematic. It’s almost as though she is going back to pre-history – just like the landscape around Catterline.”

This new book will delight her fans. The fact she has been ‘outed’ half a century after her death is incidental. What is important about this aspect of the book, is the way in which it paints a more rounded picture of her as a human being and as an artist who painted intense emotion into her artworks.

This exhibition, alongside a second exhibition of Eardley’s work at The Portland Gallery in London which opens on May 1, presents buyers and admirers alike with the opportunity to see Eardley’s work up close.

One of the additional highlights is a 22 minute colour film featuring Eardley called Three Scottish Painters made in 1964, which will be showing in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. The gallery website also has a wealth of material which will delight fans.

Detail: Joan Eardley

0 Kelvingrove Belongs To YOU!

This is an unedited version of a piece which I wrote for The Herald's Arts section on Christmas Eve

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

Argyle Street, Glasgow

0141 276 9599

www.glasgowmuseums.com

Closed Dec 25 & 26, afternoon of Dec 31, Jan 1 & Jan 2

Two Children by Joan Eardley (my two children will thank me for showing it to them... when they're not children any more!)

THIS year, as a Christmas present for filing my copy in time for the past year, my editor asked me to revisit Kelvingrove’s art collection. 

Even though I live near Glasgow, since Kelvingrove reopened in 2006, I have been promising myself I’ll spend a few hours taking in just the art work, so it was a timely gift. 

I have had flying visits through some of the galleries, mostly in the company of young children, and though the art collection has been partly reconfigured by curators for the benefit of younger visitors, my two children now roll their eyes around in their head whenever I start to moon over an artwork. 

As for watching videos about art? Forget it. Recently, I managed to hoodwink my eight-year-old daughter into seeing Dali’s Christ of St. John, now relocated in a room of its own on the South balcony, and I was literally pushed out of the door before I could take in any of the interpretation panels or the fascinating film about how the painting came to Glasgow, its near demise after a vandal ripped it, and the subsequent restoration.

Dali’s Christ of St. John

She did, on the other hand, linger lovingly over a black and white picture of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style gallery on the ground floor, as her school house name is Mackintosh. I even photographed her with Toshie... They made a lovely couple.

Like many visitors to Kelvingrove, I had my first taster of major artists in Kelvingrove. I vividly recall my first glimpse of the Dali hanging at the end of a long corridor. The image burned its way into my already overheated synapses and stayed there, ready to come out whenever I needed it.

Last week, I had a guided tour with senior curator Jean Walsh. We started off in the new Glasgow Boys Gallery on the ground floor. This gallery opened in October in response to the overwhelming success of Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880-1900, the most popular exhibition ever held in Kelvingrove.

Lavery’s large luminescent oil of Anna Pavlova, painted in 1910, ushers you into this space. All the well-known Boys, Guthrie, Walton, Henry, Hornel, Lavery, are back in town.There is also work by lesser-known names such as James Nairn, Harrington Mann, Alexander Roche and the only sculptor in the camp, Pittendrigh Macgillivray.

It’s a fine addition to the Kelvingrove’s repertoire and good news that there is now a place to see the Glasgow Boys in their home turf. Also on the ground floor, is Looking At Art and the Art Discovery Centre, which have provided the curators with an chance to bring out art work from stores and add interpretation panels.

“All our paintings and sculpture have their own file, a bit like in a a doctors’ surgery,’ Jean tells me, ‘so we have been able to add to the stories behind the work. Some purists dislike this approach, but it is very popular.’

Fascinating examples in these sections include John Pringle, a Glasgow optician and amateur painter who worked around the turn of the twentieth century, an Anne Redpath painting showing both sides of the picture (she painted on back and front) and a ‘restoration in progress’ painting by Glasgow Girl Norah Neilston Gray.

In the Looking at Art section, there’s a pick n mix approach to presenting the work, from a small Jack Vettriano self-portrait, (recently loaned by owners Miles and Marina Turner), to a Stanley Spencer from his Port Glasgow war-time period, a Lesley Banks painting, 39 

Weeks and Waiting, side-by-side with a Joan Eardley painting of street children, and Avril Paton’s now iconic Windows on the West, featuring a Glasgow tenement in winter, now the most viewed painting in Kelvingrove after the Dali.

Upstairs, the treasure hunt continues, via the Dali in its new ‘home’ and into the Dutch, Italian and French art rooms which all flow into one another. ‘We are lucky to have one of the finest collection of Dutch art in a municipal collection,” Jean tells me. I’m ashamed to say I had never clocked Rembrandt’s Man in Armour before, but now I’ve savoured its darkly haunting presence, I’ll be revisiting.

The collection of Impressionist and Post Impressionist work includes some beauties, including Monet’s Vetheuil, Mary Cassat’s The Young Girls and Matiise’s The Pink Tablecloth.

Every Picture Tells a Story will keep young visitors entertained, talking out as it does, the story behind a handful of the collections’ paintings, but I found Scottish Identify in Art a motley mixter-maxter of eras and styles.

Covering everything from Tartanalia to a rather fearsome collection of guns which once belonged to Glasgow architect called Charles Whitelaw, you’ll also see some fine Raeburns and a handsome marble bust of Adam Smith, carved many years after his death by Patric Park.

The corridors outside these galleries also contain some easily missed work, including Alison Watt’s 2007 painting, Phantom, and a giant stone wall work by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Clay the Life. Blink and you’ll miss perfect Peploe still lifes on these walls too.

Give yourself a present this holiday, and pay a visit to Glasgow’s Kelvingrove. After all, it belongs to you.

The Druids - Bringing in the Mistletoe by Henry and Hornel

Detail: Kelvingrove Belongs To YOU!

0 Tripping the Light Fantastic to Joan Eardley Country

The Watchie, where Joan Eardley often painted

Joan Eardley at her easel in Catterline

Catterline Wall by Stuart Buchanan (Stuart lives and works in Catterline – he lives in her old house and paints in The Watchie, where Joan also painted)

Kate Downie's Hymervan monoprint series- Catterline IV

Now here's a bus-trip which sounds hard to resist...

Last year, one of the highlights of the annual Mearns Connections Festival, based near Laurencekirk in the north east of Scotland, was a Ballad Bus which featured  a voyage around the work of Arbuthnott-born author Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

This year, the organisers have decided to focus on another local hero, Joan Eardley.

Joan Eardley, who died in 1963 at the age of just 42, had a house in the north east coastal village Catterline, which is close to Arbuthnott, birthplace of Sunset Song author, James Leslie Mitchelll (Lewis Grassic Gibbon).

Like many people with a passion for art, I am drawn to the work of Joan Eardley like a moth to the light. Joan, like Grassic Gibbon, burrowed her way underneath her subject matter in a way which is almost primordial.

Her Catterline paintings represent some of her best work. When I first saw them in the 2007 at the retrospective devoted to her at the National Gallery of Scotland, I was quite literally thunderstruck. Up until then, I had only really known about the paintings she did of Glasgow street kids in the late 1950s.

The Ballad Bus, will rev up for business on Saturday August 13 and will take its passengers through the life, works and times of Joan Eardley. In Catterline, it will visit  places which were both everyday and special to Joan.  

Organisers promise 'an interesting, relaxed and enjoyable Ballad Bus experience is in store for all those attending, including the usual morning coffee break with home-baked scones.' (That does it, I'm in...)

The Ballad Bus leaves from the Grassic Gibbon Centre in Arbuthnott (three miles from either the A90 Aberdeen to Dundee dual carriageway, or the A92 coast road) just after 9.30am. on Saturday 13^th August, and will collect passengers en- route starting with Edzell Post Office at 9am.,  Fettercairn Ramsay Arms Hotel at 9.10am  and then  Laurencekirk Mearns Academy at 9.20am. 

It is advisable to book places by phoning the Grassic Gibbon Centre on 01561 361668,  or emailing isabella@grassicgibbon.com 

For further information, see:

www.mearnsconnections.com. 

Or from Marion Robson 01561 377501

The Ballad Bus is part of the Mearns Connections traditional arts festival organised annually by a committee of  Mearns folk chaired by the master of entertainment and good fun, Mr Jim Brown.

Beehives at Catterline by Joan Eardley

Detail: Tripping the Light Fantastic to Joan Eardley Country