Joan Eardley – serie

Discover the life and work of Joan Eardley; one of Scotland’s best loved artists and a major figure of the post-war British art scene.Joan Eardley was one of the best-loved Scottish artists of the twentieth century. Her observations of children in the back streets of Glasgow as well as her expressionistic drawings and oils of the elements on the north-east coast of Scotland have caught the imagination of the Scottish public. Eardley is cherished as a painter of the Scottish identity in both town and country, who had a unique ability to sum up a community and the timeless drama of the natural world. This book examines Eardley's ouevre and its place in the international and British context.It includes paintings and drawings from private collections and works from the collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which also holds the Joan Eardley Archive.

Joan Eardley (1921-1963) is one of Scotland's most admired artists. During a career that lasted barely fifteen years, she concentrated on two very distinct themes: children in the Townhead area of central Glasgow, and the fishing village of Catterline, just south of Aberdeen, with its leaden skies and wild sea. The contrast between this urban and rural subject matter is self-evident, but the two are not, at heart, so very different. Townhead and Catterline were home to tight-knit communities, living under extreme pressure: Townhead suffered from overcrowding and poverty, and Catterline from depopulation brought about by the declining fishing industry. Eardley was inspired by the humanity she found in both places.These two intertwining strands are the focus of this book, which looks in detail at Eardley's working processes. Her method can be traced from rough sketches and photographs through to pastel drawings and large oil paintings. Identifying many of Eardley's subjects and drawing on unpublished letters, archival records and interviews, the authors provide a new and remarkably detailed account of Eardley's life and art.