The greatest – and most stinted – female artist Scotland ever produced is Joan Eardley (1921-63), a painter of stirring genius carried off by cancer at the age of 42. That there has never been a Tate Britain survey is a constant disgrace. But Eardley is over the border into England now, with this mesmerising group of seascapes painted outdoors at the coastal village of Catterline, about 50 miles to the north of Dundee in whipping gale, cold sunlight and stinging rain. Think of Turner, then double the energy.
Eardley’s seas are wide and potent, rolling straight towards you beneath the deluge. Flashes of turquoise, cobalt and ice blue are occasionally visible through gathering clouds. The earthy umber of the local rocks draws attention to itself, here and there, but the principal vision of these paintings comes all in white: the exhilarating force of the North Sea.
Summer Grasses and Barley on the Clifftop (c.1962)
Eardley had been working on the paintings of Glasgow children for which she is equally known when she contracted mumps in the early 1950s. A friend drove her to Aberdeenshire to convalesce. This is how she first came upon the clifftop village of Catterline, its cottages strung along on a crescent of dark bay battered by the waves. “Just vast waste and vast seas,” she wrote in excitement.
Villagers would phone when a storm was on its way so Eardley could take the next train from Glasgow. Eventually she bought her own cottage at No 1 South Row. Her work got bigger, embracing the expanding panorama, and she started to paint on board when canvas proved too flimsy in high wind. Some of the works in Berwick are unglazed and 5ft wide, waves crashing against the shore in never-ending drama.
The ever-changing waves are a match for Eardley’s own surging intensity as a painter, and perhaps as a personThe ever-changing waves are a match for Eardley’s own surging intensity as a painter, and perhaps as a person
Photographs show Eardley painting in a fishing smock in fine weather, a flying suit and heavy boots in winter. She had to rope her easel to a rock in a gale. Even a masterpiece such as Summer Sea, from the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), has an elemental turbulence to its onslaught of waves beneath an oceanic blue sky. It could just as well be winter. The sea is pure exhilaration, one climax after another, and so are Eardley’s paintings.
Her seascapes appear both ancient – the unchanging tide – and entirely modern. She was at work at the same time as the abstract expressionists. The surface of Eardley’s canvases – in all their glowing colours and powerfully divergent brushstrokes – is scored by the handle of the brush to get a momentary seam between the waves; by flecks of sand and flakes of paint that have fallen lower down the craggy canvas; even by the roiling wind around her, which seems to strafe the paint.
Green and Blue Boats (1963)
She worked with boat paint as well as oils, with overlaid newspaper and grasses. One painting shows a vessel with a number inscribed on its bow, like early pop art. Diluted oils drip down the canvas, coagulating in tiny pools, as if she was working too fast to notice. Just as the sea appears both liquid and substantial, so her paintings have these qualities. Where other painters crown a seascape with a sun or moon, she notices a sudden burst of light among the waves or a drift of cirrus above the horizon. Her thrilling picture The Sea No 2 shows the parabola swing of sea in the bay, one wave crashing against the cliffs as the previous one departs. The pivot is a tiny red hyphen at the level of the village.
The ever-changing waves are a match for Eardley’s own surging intensity as a painter, and perhaps as a person. She was exceptionally independent, always going her own way. I grew up with her paintings, indelible to me as they are to so many others living in Scotland, and it is a source of intense if irrational pride to me that they are being shown in all their magnificent glory at the Granary Gallery in Berwick, as part of the RSA’s 200th anniversary celebrations. The gallery is one of the smallest in Britain, yet one of the best. This is an immense coup for such a modest space and one in the eye for London.
Joan Eardley: The Sea at Catterline is at the Granary Gallery, Berwick, until 11 October
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