Joanna Meacock, curator of British Art at Glasgow Museums, gave an inspiring presentation about plans to present a digital ‘festival’ around the 24 Eardley artworks in its collection. The Hunterian’s planned exhibition for summer 2021, we discovered, would be focusing on 20 or so works, including the stand-out ‘Salmon Nets and Sea’ (1960) and ‘Sweetshop, Rottenrow’ (1957–61), gifted by the poet Edwin Morgan after his death in 2010. In the summer of 2020, the official Joan Eardley website, created by artist and curator, Lynne Mackenzie, went live. The biography and timeline which I had written was swiftly joined by news of events and exhibitions from Aberdeen to Dumfries from SWARN members, all under the banner of #Eardley100. To date, we have witnessed several online seminars celebrating Eardley’s life and legacy, which can be viewed on the website. A highlight was a celebration on 18 May, Eardley’s birthday, organised by the Hunterian. Over 500 people joined the webinar from across the world for what proved to be a sparkling event chaired with elan by BBC Scotland’s arts correspondent, Pauline McLean. Leila Riszko, a curatorial assistant with the National Galleries of Scotland, who has worked on its latest Joan Eardley display, Eardley and Catterline, talked to art historian Matilda Hall about the gargantuan task of cataloguing 650 drawings in the early 1980s on behalf of the family. 10 | ART
‘Every piece of paper became a jewel in my hand’
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Matilda, who went on to marry Douglas Hall, first Keeper of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – and a true champion of Eardley – told the audience about taking the drawings out from a box under Joan’s sister Pat’s sofa and working her way through them. ‘Every piece of paper became a jewel in my hand,’ Matilda said. Most of the drawings were distributed to galleries. Over 200 went to the National Gallery of Scotland’s collection while other institutions such as the GSA, the family’s local gallery, the Lillie in Milngavie, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Glasgow Museums and the Hunterian all received gifts. Matilda revealed she even wrote to the National Art Gallery of New Zealand to offer them a drawing as it had a Catterline seascape in its collection, but they said ‘no’. A handful of drawings were kept back by the family and marked for sale. Over the years, trusted dealers, such as the late Cyril Gerber from Glasgow’s Compass Gallery and the Scottish Gallery, would come and have a look and take some away for sale. Some of these works, such as ‘Mrs Red Wallpaper’, which Joan made in either Italy or Arran, remain in private collections. Take a look at the event, which is on the Eardley website – maybe someone out there reading this has one of these drawings. The genius of Joan Eardley touches people at their core. Monitoring the Joan Eardley social media, I can see that interest in her work is at an all-time high and I couldn’t be more delighted. Here’s to Joan Eardley at 100, 150 and 200. She is now, as Edwin Morgan put it so perfectly in his poem inspired by her ‘Flood Tide’ painting, ‘beyond the sun’. Jan Patience is an arts journalist and co-organiser of the Joan Eardley centenary For more information on events marking the centenary of Eardley’s birth, check out joaneardley.com and swarnetwork. wixsite.com/swarn
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Greg Thomas
1 Joan Eardley, Flood Tide, 1962. Photograph courtesy of the Lillie Art Gallery © Joan Eardley Estate 2 Joan Eardley, Sweet Shop, Rottenrow, 1960 - 1961 © Joan Eardley Estate 3 Joan Eardley, Two Children, 1963. Glasgow Museums © Joan Eardley Estate
Margot Sandeman’s biography is entwined with those of two of Scotland’s most famous late 20thcentury artists: Joan Eardley and Ian Hamilton Finlay. But she often appears as a buoying or grounding presence, not always recognised for her own precocious artistic talent Unveiled in April 2021, the Arran Arts Heritage Trail includes 20 waymarkers scattered across the island. The seventh stone, in the small village of Corrie, bears two names – ‘Eardley : Sandeman’ – which tell the story of a deep and loving friendship. Margot Sandeman was born in 1922 to a family of artistic and cultural distinction. Her mother Muriel Boyd was a renowned needlework artist while her father Archibald Sandeman was a chemist and self-taught watercolourist. Margot grew up in a house in the Arts and Crafts style in the leafy Glasgow suburb of Bearsden, while Arran was a regular holiday destination. At the end of the 1930s, the aspiring painter followed in her mother’s footsteps to Glasgow School of Art, where in 1940 she crossed paths with a new student, another resident of Bearsden, later remembered by her friends as prone to depression yet deeply compassionate. In a 2007 interview, Sandeman recalled that she and Joan Eardley ‘were very shy of each other for about a year’, but eventually became
‘tremendously great friends’. A few years later, Sandeman would meet a similarly brooding classmate, Ian Hamilton Finlay, recalled by literary critic Derek Stanford, who met him in 1946, as ‘fair-haired’, ‘faunlike’, and ‘a little pitiful’. He had a steely edge though, and was expelled from GSA for organising a student strike, returning for a period to work as a janitor. Sandeman’s artistic fortunes would become closely interwoven with those of her two more tempestuous peers. The first step on this road was an invitation extended by her parents for Eardley to join the Sandemans on their annual trip to Arran, where Joan and Margot’s friendship deepened. The two made many more pilgrimages to the island across the remainder of the 1940s and the 1950s, sometimes renting a tiny bothy known as the Tabernacle in Corrie village (below the spot on High Corrie where Muriel’s friends Jessie M King and EA Taylor had run a summer school during the 1920s and 30s).
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