LIL NEILSON (SCOTTISH 1938-1998)
FISHERMAN'S BOTHY, CATTERLINE
Signed and inscribed to artist's label verso, oil on board
30cm x 49cm (11.75in x 19.25in)
In the summer of 1960, following graduation from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Lil Neilson attended a summer school at the prestigious arts centre Hospitalfield House. Here, she formed a portentous connection with visiting tutor Joan Eardley, who in recent years had been painting the tenements and residents of the Glasgow slum of Townhead. Neilson admired the direct vitality of Eardley’s technique, and following the summer school’s conclusion the pair remained in contact. A travelling scholarship enabled Neilson to spend a year working across Paris and Italy, but by 1962 she was back in Scotland, settling in Edinburgh. Shortly after her return, she received an invitation from Eardley to join her at her new studio in the remote coastal village of Catterline. The pair painted together, and the young Neilson assimilated technical lessons from Eardley’s landscape style. Neilson’s Catterline paintings are characterised by a frenetic expressivity and intensely brooding atmosphere, capturing the turbulent drama of the sea.When Eardley fell ill in 1963 Neilson left her job working backstage in Edinburgh theatres to nurse Eardley in Catterline. Upon Eardley’s untimely death in August 1963, Neilson purchased No. 2 South Side, Catterline, using one half of the cottage as a living space and the other as a studio. She continued to develop her energetic painterly technique and spent her time working between the Catterline cottage and Norfolk, observing the human impact upon the respective coastlines, which precipitated an interest in ecological conservation. Neilson’s paintings increasingly express her conflicting devotion to, and frustration with, the state of the landscape.Lyon & Turnbull are delighted to be presenting two substantial paintings by this important Scottish woman artist, one of which is the largest ever example we are aware of having been offered to market.