Joan Eardley & The Circle of Life - Esther Green
I don’t know what I’m painting – I’m just trying to paint!
(Joan Eardley)
There’s been a bit of a rumpus around artist Joan Eardley lately. 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of her birth & the UK art world has been arguing furiously (on one side at least) about how her body of work should be celebrated. Many Scotland-based commentators grumble that she should have been granted a London-based retrospective to widen her appeal, acknowledge her legacy & raise awareness of her work on a broader platform. They argue that somehow she has been snubbed by the London galleries & that this is a disgrace. Meanwhile, said galleries seem less concerned. Some may well be bemused by the furore.
As usual, I have an opinion on the matter & it is this: stuff London. Apart from what it can get out of us, London power has no interest whatsoever in Scotland, much less rural Scotland. Make a massive deal about her here in Scotland if you’re so committed & sooner or later they’ll realised they missed a trick, a potentially lucrative trick at that. Her expressionistic Self-portrait judges them - & us – harshly.
In fact, Joan & I share a birthday, but she had died a few years before I arrived. She was also a fellow teacher for a spell but wisely left soon after starting, opting instead for a joiner’s apprenticeship. When eight years old, her shell-shocked father took his own life & several years later her mother moved the small family to Glasgow. Initially studying at Glasgow School of Art, she worked & exhibited in Italy before focusing her work on Townhead in Glasgow.
Houses, Paris
Her later years were spent living in the remote coastal village of Catterline (just over 20 miles from Aberdeen).
Working in a range of media (including sandpaper pieces held together with paperclips), Joan frequently worked from photos, thriving on the drama of the weather, yet was grounded in her approach to portraying their effects.
What is it about Joan Eardley’s work? It would be easy to simply cite the images of button-eyed urchins that reflect the poverty of their environment so beautifully. The appeal of small children in art is frequently based on a mawkish view of childhood but Joan’s works do something more. Her dishevelled tenement waifs are highly evocative of their time & place, their days outside playing in the dirt of the gutters, blissfully unaware of their impoverished surroundings. You imagine their skint knees & bubbly noses. You hear their voices & make out their sobs. Perhaps their depiction appears sentimental but it’s also authentic. They remind those of us of a certain age what it was like growing up, playing out in the street till it was dark & making pies from dubs. I imagine her dismay at the childhood poverty of today still existing on scale.
Sentiment creeps in through the empathy & recognition of their harsh reality, with the understanding of how difficult their lives might be & will be. Her intention I think was compassion over nostalgia however. What they do represent is Joan’s love for & connection with her subjects. Her Brother & Sister in Aberdeen Art Gallery is one of the most iconic images in the collection. (Currently it is very poorly hung, one of the few less favourable aspects of the reopened space).
Her images of children are instantly recognisable as hers but also believable. As unmaternal as I undoubtedly am, part of me wants to take a wet cloth over their faces & sew their pockets back on.
One of the best characteristics of Joan Eardley is her allegiance to place… & I love the fact that that place is Aberdeenshire. She said of Catterline, “When I’m painting in the North East (of Scotland), I hardly ever move out of the village, I hardly ever move from one spot. I do feel the more you know something, the more you can get out of it. That is the North East. It’s just vast…well you’ve just got to paint it.”
This idea of remaining in the same place, though never being still, yet always delving deeper into it resonates. As someone that has lived in the same city all her life & worked in the same building for over 29 years, I love this appreciation of staying put. & despite travels abroad, Scotland was her ultimate choice.
You see patterns & cycles wherever you look when you “stay.” It gives you a chance to do the good things well & the bad things differently when you know what to expect. In Joan’s landscapes & seascapes you can sense the turning of the planet. She records the changing of the seasons & the impact the often severe elemental power has on this part of the world. She was known to chase storms as they loomed in order to chronicle their impermanent energy. These are highly effective snapshots of the chaos & uneasiness of the climate. In this corner of the world, we are so well acquainted with the atmosphere of her coastal pictures, the intense & varied greys of her North Sea.
Even her summer-scapes appear scratchy & itchy. They are bouts of hayfever in waiting, the bales of hay & yellow fields a dry reminder that even when the storm has passed, discomfort awaits. There is said to be grit present in some of her paintings thanks to her working en plein air.
Her descriptions of grasses & her striking method of expressing them is intimately familiar despite its abstraction. The natural world rises up before us on roadsides, through cracks in the concrete – it’s as if she’s documenting & interpreting the propensity of nature to “find a way.”
As she depicts the childhood of others, so does Joan Eardley remind us of our own worldly cycle. Her tragically early death may be a reminder of the transience of life in spite of the beauty we might leave behind, but her work is of the earth – the soil, the humanity & the unforgiving conditions we overcome.
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