Artist Joan Eardley
5/5/202627 min
In Scotland, from 1940 to 1963, the artist Joan Eardley produced a cache of monumental seascapes, landscapes, and poignant portraits. When she died aged 42 of breast cancer, people were still trying to categorise her work - part abstract expressionist, part Scottish colourist, part social realist, part kitchen sink (one of her first solo exhibitions was in a cinema). She worked with oil and pastels, but also used collage and plaster on her canvas, as well as gravel and sand and bits of plants (one gallerist scraped these bits off, confused.) She even used graffiti in her portraits of children living in tenements in Glasgow, decades before it became fashionable. A new exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland hangs Joan's work alongside some of the most cherished and valuable paintings in their collection, including works by Monet and Constable. Curator Kerry Gledhill talks to Antonia Quirke about looking for 'synergies' between the works she has chosen to exhibit, and about Joan's short, passionate, productive life and working practice.
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First 90 secondsKerry Gledhill· Guest0:00
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Antonia Quirke· Host0:03
[gentle music] Welcome to the documentary, In the Studio, from the BBC World Service, the program that investigates the creative process. I'm Antonia Quirke, and this edition is unusual in that its subject has been dead some 60 years.
Joan Eardley· Soundbite0:20
They, they don't take much encouraging to come out and be painted. They don't pose. They usually come up and say, "Will you paint me?"
Antonia Quirke· Host0:32
From the 1940s to the early 1960s, the Scottish artist, Joan Eardley, painted portraits of children and wild land and seascapes. These nature paintings were intensely created, mostly outdoors in all weathers. Joan applied oil paint with tremendous vigor and dynamism, often leaving bits of sand or plants embedded in the canvas. These paintings are large and full of drama. Eardley was not an abstract artist. You always know what you're looking at when you see her work. It's clearly a field of flowers or a stormy sea, but her canvases can seem almost abstract because they're so layered and sculptural. Prolific, collectible, and on the cusp of global success, Joan died of breast cancer in 1963, aged just 42.