Joan Eardley

Two Travelling Scholarships took her to France and Italy for eight months and on her return Glasgow School of Art showed her work which contained powerful studies of peasants in Italy and France. She set up a studio in an old tenement in the centre of Glasgow and for several years drew and painted tenement life of the local children with a deep rapport, but without sentimentality.

In 1950 she discovered the fishing village of Catterline on the North East coast of Scotland and there, began some of her most important paintings.A few years later she moved to a cottage on the cliff top at Catterline. It was there that her style developed dramatically, her great paintings of this period were produced at the very edge of the sea in all weather with frenzied expressionist brush strokes conveying the surging power of the sea with extraordinary realism.

Life was to be short for Joan Eardley. She became ill and died in 1963 at the age of 42, only months after being elected R.S.A.

After her death the Scottish Arts Council arranged a Memorial Exhibition at Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow and the Royal Scottish Academy ,Edinburgh. In 1965 the New Charing Cross Gallery, Glasgow showed over 60 of her works and in 1975 the Third Eye Centre opened with an Eardley solo exhibition.

On the 25th anniversary of Eardley’s death in 1988 a major retrospective exhibition was presented at the Talbot Rice Centre and Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh. An exhaustive book, “Joan Eardley” written by Cordelia Oliver was published by Mainstream to accompany the exhibition.

Eardley’s work can be seen in public collections at Aberdeen, Birmingham, Dundee, Glasgow, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the National Art Gallery of New Zealand, the Tate Gallery, Contemporary Arts Society and many others.