73 · Eardley’s watercolour paints (with ear of corn) Private collection
74 · Autumn Flowers and Seed-heads, c.1960
Pastel and oil on three sheets of paper, 25 x 22.6 cm (irregular) National Galleries of Scotland: presented by the artist’s sister, Pat Black, 1987
but most had a more experimental, preparatory role. She often started on a single sheet and then attached additional sheets in a piecemeal fashion with paperclips. Over 1,300 drawings were found in her studios after her death. They were integral to her working practice – partly as studies to be translated into larger paintings, partly as stages in a thinking process. William Macaulay, who ran The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh, wanted more of her drawings to sell, but Eardley had reservations, having let some go and later regretted it. She explained that ‘previously I have set little value on my drawings, except for my own personal use – and they have often become destroyed during the working of a picture’.24 But having recently been kept indoors through illness, she had sorely missed them: ‘I found myself so much in need of drawings, to let me feel some contact with my subjects and my work when I was unable to get around last winter – that I swore I would not sell any for a long time, once I had managed to do some more’.25 In 1960 she began to stick real grasses, stalks and seed-heads into her landscape paintings, embedding them in her home-made, claggy oil paint. There are not many works of this type: the most substantially collaged paintings are the richly matted Seeded Grasses and Daisies, September, 1960 [75] and Summer Fields, 1961 [76]. Ever the realist, instead of painting grasses, she simply picked up real ones and pressed them into the congealed paint. This collage approach seems to slightly pre-date her use of collage in her Glasgow paintings, when she stuck newspaper and sweet wrappers onto her portraits of children. Some 92 joan eardley
of the seascapes have newspaper embedded in the foaming waves to give them three-dimensional substance, such as January Flow Tide [99], which also includes a piece of silver foil. She stuck a newspaper crossword into the clotted paint in one seascape, allowing the squares of the puzzle to read as a fishing net.26 Eardley included Seeded Grasses and Daisies, September in her show at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh in May 1961. The critic Sydney Goodsir Smith saw Eardley hanging it and cautioned her that it would be ‘bits of dust’ within a year.27 Eardley was furious and argued back: she knew her craft and was confident it would last. (It has.) The artist Anne Redpath (1895–1965) also saw and admired this painting in the exhibition, but she too wondered about its longevity.28 Eardley does seem to have had second thoughts about the process, and never used it again to the same degree. It was
