Joan Eardley and the Restless Landscape

“While sketching in the street, Eardley would set her easel up on a child’s pushchair. Andrew, then twelve, cheekily asked, ‘Do you want to paint me, missus?’ And she did.

Ann remembers: ‘My mum said to Andrew, “I want to know where you’re going after school.” And he said, “I’m going to a woman’s house.” She got him by the scruff of the neck and marched him right down to Joan’s. Joan said, “I’m just painting him,” and my ma said, “I’ve got twelve weans if you want to paint them.'” – Pat and Ann Samson, The Guardian, 

That’s how Eardley came to paint the Samson children in the backstreets of Glasgow – children who came to her studio to sit by the fire, eat cheese and treacle sandwiches, and pocket thruppenny bits.

In an interview, she said:

“This particular family, they amuse me – just the fact that they hardly notice me when they come in. They’re full of what they’ve been doing in a day, and who’s gone to jail today, and who’s broken into what shop, and who’s flung a pie in whose face, and so on. But they’re only talking to themselves as much as to me. They’re just really letting out all their energy that they haven’t been able to let out in school, because they’ve been told to keep quiet, and they just go on and on, and I watch them and I try to paint them or think about them.”

Neve’s Unquiet Landscape

This post is another spurred by Christopher Neve’s Unquiet Landscape, which invites us to see each painter as part of a conversation between land, mind, and imagination. Painting, he writes, is “a process of finding out,” while writing about painting is risky because “pictures have their own meaning which will not accept words.”

His essays are like journeys – anchored in place, artist, and state of mind. “The landscape commits suicide every day,” he declares, a melodramatic but striking phrase for the daily transience of light and colour. Landscape is never fixed; it remakes itself constantly, indifferent to us.

Rain is no respecter of persons
the snow doesn’t give a soft white
damn whom it touches
— e.e. cummings, Viva, 27

This sense of impermanence and indifference is central to Neve’s account of Joan Eardley. On the cliffs at Catterline she faced a seascape always in motion, always breaking itself apart. Her paintings are not views but records of dying and renewal – embodying Neve’s belief that landscape is never still, never safe, yet always shaping us.

The City: Glasgow’s Children

“I like the friendliness of the back streets. Life is at its most uninhibited here. Dilapidation is often more interesting to a painter as is anything that has been used and looks used.” — Joan Eardley

“Glasgow, weatherless except for the drizzle of soot on stone. The smell of the brewery. A room, which had been a ramshackle photographer’s studio, at 204 St James’s Road. It was above a corner shop, in the Townhead slums, an older part of the city than the Gorbals, demolished now. It was a small room in which to paint, visited with neverending curiosity by the six boys and six cross-eyed girls of the Samson family who lived across the passage. In this place during the early 1950s Joan Eardley worked under the difficulty that she preferred. Out of the apparent confusion of the surface of indoor life, a storm of paper, paint, graffiti, newspapers, torn posters and bills, old clothes, tins and cartons, she could make pictures that had some meaning for her.” 

Eardley seemed to seek out difficulty. From the rough and tumble of a slum – graffiti, faded posters, torn paper, sweet wrappers, and the clutter of poverty – she made something humane. Born in Sussex, trained in Glasgow, she had an instinctive affinity with the overworked and deprived. Out of poverty and squalor, she made tenderness.

Neve’s argument – that landscape mirrors the artist’s inner weather -applies as much to Eardley’s Glasgow as to her Catterline. The backstreets, like the sea, were alive with restless motion and noise.

The Move to Catterline

In 1950, while convalescing from the mumps near Stonehaven, she discovered Catterline, a fishing village three miles to the south.She began to paint there more and more especially when the forecast promised storms.

It was no picturesque retreat: two rows of cottages along the top of a grassy cliff, a tiny harbour below, and black rocks continually beaten by the sea. In rough weather the cottages seemed pressed flat by wind; hail and spindrift blurred sea and sky into one shifting field of grey.

“Dread is a desire for what one fears (Kierkegaard). Perhaps Joan Eardley feared it, the enormous motion of the sea which was to become her true subject, because at first she did not approach it closely but watched it instead from above, skirting the cliffs as if to find the best way eventually to creep down to it. She lived and worked facing directly out to the centre of the bay, then on its north edge, then on its south. If you did not know this, you could easily discover it from the paintings. The Creel Inn, the only public place in the village, where she put up on her first prolonged visits, is tacked on to the row of cottages with its back to the fields, looking straight out to sea. Before long, when sure that Catterline suited her imagination exactly, she began to use the derelict coastguard cottage, called the Watch House, that stands by itself with a black tarred conservatory and a small patch of vegetable garden above the cliff to the north; but, painting outside it, she must have found that there was sometimes too much seabrightness in her eyes when she looked down the coast southwards, past the distant lighthouse, so she moved round to the last of the upward-tilting row of cottages with its back to the light on the far side of the harbour, the cottage nearest to the sea.” 

The Sea and the Paint

“The sea, the sea.”

In Xenophon’s Anabasis, it was the Greek soldiers’ cry of deliverance: Thálatta! Thálatta! Baudelaire saw the sea as “landscape in perpetual movement,” and Neve believed that “to paint the sea convincingly is a near impossibility.” Its nature -movement itself – refuses capture.

Cattaline captured her imagination. It drew her back again and again until, in 1961, it became her permanent home. Increasingly, she began going there to paint outdoors. She would leave Glasgow for Catterline, especially when she heard on the wireless that the weather would be bad and the sea rough.

She would get out at deserted Stonehaven and, using a bicycle or an old Lambretta scooter, double back south through the fields to Catterline. It is a tiny place, two rows of single-storey stone cottages built along the top of a grassy cliff. Below this, a long way below, the semi-circle of a diminutive natural harbour with a short stone jetty, wedge-shaped, pointing across the bay. On its north side the bay is guarded inadequately against the weather by a natural breakwater of black rocks, one larger and blacker than the others, like an upended loaf, which are constantly run over and around by the white surf. It would be wrong to describe it as a picturesque place. In rough weather, when the huge seas are grey and the sky is black and the cottages lean in a narrow line of stone as though flattened along the cliff edge, the wind is suffocating, twitching the short grass quickly this way and that to show the purple-red earth in its parting, and cutting the tops off gigantic breakers to disperse them as spindrift indiscernible from the hail blown in the air and on to the sea. – Neve

She worked in a succession of cottages on the cliff edge – places without electricity, running water, or sanitation, but with the sea at the door. “A great wee house,” she wrote, “I am sitting looking out at the darkness and the sea. I think I shall paint here. This is a strange place—it always excited me.”

By the winter of 1959–60, she had painted her way down to the beach, boards tied to rocks and posts against the wind. Her handling grew broader, more urgent; spray seemed mixed with pigment. Paint became weather itself – flecks of paint and seaspray inseparable.

Her  sea pictures are full of movement, immense, and horizonless. The sea fills the canvas, surging over the jetty wall, dragging everything into its mass. The graffiti of the Samson children portraits finds an echo in the scratched boat numbers and scrawled hulls. What had been static in Glasgow is now in motion.

Endings

For all its beauty, the landscape remains unnervingly alien, indifferent to any meaning we would impose: Neve closes his book with this observation:

This is how Neve he ends his portrait of Joan Eardley:

When Joan Eardley was forty-two, cancer spread suddenly up into her head, making her blind. What she most dreaded was to be moved away from Catterline for treatment. When she died, her ashes were scattered on Catterline beach, into the wind. I doubt if you will find better sea pictures than hers.

Featured image: Joan Eardley, January Flow tide 1961