I've been saving this one....

... didn't know why. But I suppose it was for today:


In a recorded interview with Joan Eardley from the early 1960s she speaks of her love for the back streets of Glasgow and the children playing in the closes:

" I have been painting them for seven years...they don't pose - they come up and say 'will you paint me?'... I watch them moving about and do the best I can...the Samson's - they amuse me - they are full of what's gone on today - whose broken into what shop and whose flung a pie in whose face - it goes on and on. They just let out all their life and energy... and I just watch them and I do try and think about them in painterly terms...all the bits of red and bits of colour and they wear each other's clothes - never the same thing twice running...even that doesn't matter... they are Glasgow - the richness Glasgow has - I hope it will always have - a living thing, intense quality - you can't ever know what you are going to do but as long as Glasgow has this I'll always want to paint." (Joan Eardley, Exhibition Catalogue 2007, p. 31f)

In the close
Mixed media collage in Moleskine
13x36cm
[Lorraine's Moley]

So, I'm back...

Some music to go alongside the bit of Eardley?

Try these... they worked well yesterday to drown out the noise of the Motherwell supporters who got on the train in Edinburgh:







OMG... so many to choose from...

Bits and Pieces write-up part 2

Joan Eardley, Rottenrow, 1956
Oil on Canvas, 94x164cm
Private Collection

As promised, here is a commentary on the fourth and final part of the Bits and Pieces workshop about Joan Eardley. At the centre of this fourth part were again children scenes, but this time very much in the shape of complex street scenes with a lot of activity and well-developed composition.

The exhibition tour focused exclusively on the Glasgow room of the exhibition: a series of somber interior pieces and some of her lightest, and most complex compositions of street scenes: groups of children playing, skipping ropes, pushing prams, holding arms and hands.

These street scenes share a number of common elements in terms of composition - as you can see from the two images I've included from the catalogue: A fairly linear composition of road, pavement and shop fronts provides the urban, highly-structured yet dynamic backdrop for various groups of children.

Joan Eardley, Children in a Glasgow Back Street
Oil on Canvas, 74x140cm
Private Collection

The figures, not unlike the backdrop, are composed of what appears almost incidental and random colours, marks and textures. In both scenes, it is difficult to disentangle the actual work process - what shapes, marks and textures were laid down before and after each other. This sense of spontaneous development is all the same held together but a strong composition.

There is in fact a third, and later street scene, in the room - my personal favourite - the pavement is sloping upwards to the left corner, the children are in lighter, almost pastel colours, angled too - and in fact, the whole scene - titled Glasgow Back Street with Children Playing - is marked by a greater sense of abstraction: rythms of colours and shapes moving through a group of children where only the faces are discernible (unfortunately it's too large to scan): but, go and have a look for yourself.

The exhibition room with these street scenes also includes a number of interior scenes, a few years earlier, the four scenes depict Angus Neil - close friend and frequent sitter - in altogether more sombre and structured paintings. Yet, again, each features strong bursts of colour to offset the muted greys and a glorious sense of detail. I have included The Table as an example, and although the catalogue reproductions are pretty good, you need to think of the yellow in the top right as bright and shiny, and the red stripe in the left background as vibrant too. I very much like the contemplative calm of the model playing off the lived in/off table and the sun-lit window.

Joan Eardley, The Table, 1953
Oil on Canvas, 61x91.5 cm
The MacLeod Collection

I seem to be running out of time again and yet have to write about the workshop session and my impressions/insights from the series. So, again: more to follow.

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Children playing in a backcourt

Backcourt and skipping rope,
Mixed media on paper
24x30cm

Without too many words this morning: this is the final piece I did in the Bits and Pieces workshop which was running in conjunction with the Joan Eardley exhibition. A streetscene with cut out figures of children playing in acrylics, oil pastel, ink and collage.

I'll be writing more about the workshop at some point over the weekend. But at the moment I am smiling to myself as the 'contour drawing' of tearing out shapes with paper seems an easy and little scary way of starting to put people into my work... will continue with that.

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Upcoming Joan Eardley exhibition

The National Gallery in Edinburgh is going to hold a major retrospective of Joan Eardley - a Scottish figurative and landscape artist whose work presents an important contribution to the move towards abstraction in mid-c20th European and Northamerican art.

Joan Eardley, Children and Chalked Wall 3,
Collage on Canvas,
National Gallery of Scotland
GMA 853

I'm very excited about this, as Eardley has been one of the most fascinating artists I discovered during the last year. The exhibition will open on November 6 and last until January 13 in the National Gallery complex.

Eardley's studio was located during the late 1940s in Glasgow's Trongate in the East End, and from here, her works of the children of the East End give powerful testimony to the life in inner-city tenements... a kind of visual urban ethnography of postwar Glasgow.

From the mid 1950s onwards until her death at only 43 in 1963, Eardley divided her time between the small fishing village of Catterline on the Scottish north-east coast and Glasgow.

Joan Eardley, Catterline in Winter
Oil on Board
National Gallery of Scotland
GMA 888

The energy within these landscapes, the palette used by her - just see the neutrals with which she painted Catterline in Winter, and the markmaking and texture within these paintings are terrific.... and I probably leave my attempt at art critique as that for the time being. I've just been to a geography conference, and still need a bit of distance to talk about the complexity of landscape and culture that doesn't run counter with my academic self ;)

As for the Eardley exhibition - they are offering a short course during the exhibition. Called Bits and Pieces, it is based on one's exploration of the exhibition and on experimenting with collage (that's the bits and pieces bit) both for landscape and figurative work. That'll mean trecking across the Edinburgh after work, but it will be more than well worth it, even just for having the opportunity to explore the exhibition four times! I will write more about this in due course and am currently just savouring the anticipation.

Working in sets

I've uploaded some more small pieces to the Etsy shop. Both etsy and ebay feature many small-sized original pieces. The format that is particular popular is that of traditional playing cards - 2.5"x3.5". As Art Cards, Edition and Originals (short ACEO) or Art Trading Cards (ATC), these small works are proving popular as a highly collectible yet inexpensive entry point for people to start buying original art.

I have been doing some ACEOs at various points - both for my sky studies but also as a way of exploring composition, lines and values in potential larger paintings. Now, I've uploaded some of my earlier ones which are of the rooflines, chimneys, angles and tiles of the tenement block opposite mine.

These are done in ink on watercolour paper - if you look at them as a set, you can trace the increasing abstraction of a similar subject: lines and marks have become more and more sparse and in the third one the chimney and its shadow shape is only alluded to.

Set of three ACEOs,
Rooftop impressions #1-3, 2.5x3.5",
ink on paper

There are many interesting ACEOs available on Etsy - if you click here, it should take you to a selection of them

In the zone...

Garden door, Crail, Mixed media in Sketchbook, 14x21 cm

Earlier today, a colleague mentioned how he'd been sketching while on holidays and how relaxing he found it just to focus on one thing at a time.

This feeling of 'being single-minded' resonates with my own thoughts on sketching. In fact, it was the recent class on reflective surfaces that reminded me of it: loosing myself in the observation of one object, its details, and how in turn these details make up the object and the scene.

There are many blogs and sites on the web that discuss sketching, keeping sketching journals and many of them discuss this simple beauty of making 'Travels with a sketchbook' (as Katherine Tyrrell's blog is called).

'Travelling' both literally and metaphorically is a good point here: while sitting still or standing to take in the scene and to get down a sketch, our eyes are all the same busy with watching, looking and our mind is busy making sense(s) - and so are our hands with pencils, graphite or other tools.

Here are a few recent discoveries of sketching/drawing blogs:

• See.Be.Draw
• Laurelines
• Jana's Journal and Sketch Blog

'Flow' is the term used in psychology on this sense of absorption and interest created by a challenging and interesting task. See here for some elaboration in a Wikipedia entry. And below are some examples of my own flow when sketching (all mixed media in sketchbook, 14x21 cm) in Crail - a very cutesy fishing village in Eastneuk: