Joan Eardley RSA (British, 1921-1963)
Sun on the Sea
oil on board
64.5 x 122cm (25 3/8 x 48 1/16in).
Footnotes:
Provenance
With Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1959.
Mrs N Iona Mitchison (acquired from the above in 1959); thence by descent to the present owners.

Exhibited
Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1959, no. 221 (published as no. 301).

Eardley first exhibited landscapes at the Gaumont Cinema in Aberdeen in 1951. At this time, whilst convalescing from the mumps, she was taken to Catterline near Stonehaven for the first time by her friend Annette Stephen where she stayed at the Creel Inn. Annette bought a cottage - The Watch House - and when she married it was put at Joan's disposal. Thus began her relationship with the area which would shape her later career.

Eardley was captivated by the wild seas off Catterline and would often travel from Glasgow when word of an approaching storm reached her. Such was her connection with the place that in 1955, she bought her own house in the village and much of the rest of her career was spent capturing the seas and landscape around Catterline.

'I think I am painting what I feel about scenery - but certainly not scenery with a name because that is the northeast - it's just a waves, vast seas, vast areas of cliff.'
(F. Pearson, Joan Eardley, National Galleries of Scotland, 2009, p. 55)

Eardley's seascapes were painted en plein air, often with larger boards lashed to an easel weighed down by rocks. The power of the sea and ferocity of the wind can be felt in her expressive and immediate brushstrokes, but also in the scratching out of paint and frequent inclusion of sand and other debris either blown onto the work or applied by Eardley herself.

Eardley described her working methods:

'When I'm painting in the northeast - I hardly ever move out of the village. I hardly ever move from one spot. I find the more I know the place, the more I know the particular spot, the more I find to paint in that particular spot...I very often find I'll take my paints to a certain place that has moved me and I'll begin to paint there and I find perhaps by the end of the summer I haven't moved from that place - my paintings are still there and I've worn a kind of mark in the ground and I leave my paints there overnight and I seem to build up a sort of table and...a studio seems to have arrived outside'
(F. Pearson, Joan Eardley, National Galleries of Scotland, 2009, p. 55).

Sun on the Sea shows a rare break in Eardley's clouds, as the sun fights to push through the passing storm. The introduction of this light source brings glints of blues, golds, and pinks across her otherwise full and tempestuous sea. These colours contrast heavily with the coastline still in shadow and rendered in dark paints, some of which are thickly applied to create impasto and others thinly enough to allow the paint to drip down the image. The scale on which Earley has painted pulls the viewer in to her tumultuous and ever-changing landscape in which one can almost feel the bitter wind and spray whipping off the sea.

Eardley, who died at the tragically young age of 42 in 1963, was one of Britain's most remarkable artists of the post war period. And Sun on the Sea is a very fine example of one of her deeply expressive seascapes from this later period in her life and career.
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