JOAN EARDLEY Sea No. 6, 1962 oil and mixed media on board (Image: artsy)
I recall watching a television documentary one evening in the 90s about Joan Eardley (1921-1963), the great Scottish based painter who’s short and premature life produced a highly expressive and personal art. Though much of the documentary escapes my memory (I‘ve searched in vain online for the title of the particular programme), Eardley’s bold art depicting rugged seascapes of Catterline, a fishing village on the North Sea in Scotland, left a great impression on me and inspired me to relish the challenge of painting outdoors in the elements and challenge me to think more about abstraction design in compositions.
JOAN EARDLEY Rough Sea, 1962 oil and mixed media on board (Image: artsy)
Plein air painting can be as unpredictable as it is immediate. Experimentation and intrepidness go hand in hand, especially when wrestling with dynamic and fast changing landscapes. Eardley’s lively landscapes, whilst naturalistic and tonally congruent, are often semi-abstract in appearance, and display a wide range of mark making. Though oil paint is the predominant medium, Eardley frequently incorporated mixed media into her work, underpinned by effective and simplistic drawing.
A solo exhibition titled ‘A Sense of Place’ featured Eardley’s work in 2017 at the Scottish Modern Art Gallery, highlighting the actual places and locations where she painted. Her work could easily be dubbed ‘A Sense of Time and Place’, due to the frequent application of work such as newspaper cuttings which places her work within the actual dates when they were created, rather like a like a time capsule. Though these newspaper cuttings were most prominent in her portraits, cuttings can be spotted in her landscape work such as Rough Sea.
JOAN EARDLEY Salmon Net Posts, 1962-1963 oil on board (Image: tate.org.uk)
Eardley’s portraits feature an uncompromising approach to capturing the real lives of children in slum tenement accommodation in Glasgow. They are often seen peering out of boxed windows with pudding basin haircuts. The portraits are mask like but reveal the children’s cheerfulness and unity as well as Eardley’s own affection and empathy towards them. Making portraits in this way could be considered a bold step (whenever people ask me to make a portrait of them they always insist on looking looking beautiful! I wonder what the children in Eardley’s paintings would have thought?)
JOAN EARDLEY The Yellow Jumper, 1963 old and collage on board (Image: Invaluable)
Joan Eardley was a painter of her time and much of her work is reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism: Landscapes are flattened out, with many recognisable forms stripped down, save for natural realistic tonal relations, with a strong emphasis on an energetic application of paint to reflect the bracingly strong weather conditions on the coast. According to online publisher Sceptical Scot, Joan Eardley was reluctant to mention influences, though it seems that she was inspired by Jean Dubuffet and others. Her portraits are indeed reminiscent of Dubuffet’s naive, scratchy and gravelly textured works, as is the bright colouring.
When contemplating artists such as Joan Eardley, one always gains fresh ideas and a renewed vigour to try new things and not be afraid to follow one’s own sense of integrity when exploring places and the paint surface.