This biography, written by Helen Boden, has been republished with permission from the Dangerous Women Project, created by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
Born: 18 May 1921, United Kingdom
Died: 16 August 1963
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
Artist Joan Eardley (1921-63) seems not to have been perceived by her contemporaries as dangerous – though I imagine she could have been viewed with suspicion by some in the communities she inhabited. She was dangerous because of the choices she quietly made. After art college she worked as a joiner’s labourer, rather than completing teacher training. She painted outdoors in all weathers, and preferred the stormier sort. She travelled, but returned to Scotland, rejecting the option of settling in London that some of her contemporaries made. Here she divided her time between two testing locations. In the overcrowded, run-down district of Townhead in Glasgow city centre, she befriended and painted the local streetkids, and also depicted street scenes unlikely to go down well with city fathers bent on slum clearance, re-housing and improvement. She stayed in a number of basic dwellings in the depopulating fishing village of Catterline, Aberdeenshire, with a special affinity for homes on the edge of it – so she could go out to make her work, laden with huge boards, without the distraction of having to make polite conversation. She returned repeatedly to the same subjects, deepening her engagement with them, literally making her mark on the shoreline spot from which she observed them. Despite mental and physical ill-health, she created ever more innovative work.
Andrew Stephen, the fisherman first sent to collect the ‘young lassie’ from Stonehaven station, found no such lassie on the platform; the woman in cords and a tweed jacket had to be pointed out to him. ‘The artist’, as she became known in the village, the inhabitant who didn’t fish or farm, was dangerous enough be well kent beyond it, and to make a comfortable living (though she chose not to live comfortably) in her too short lifetime, and to exhibit widely. She became famous enough for details about the locations of her studios and her composition methods also to be well known.
She collaged grasses, grit, sweet-papers and text onto her painted landscapes and portraits. The weather itself seems similarly incorporated, rather than just represented, in her Catterline work. Like north-east writer / walker Nan Shepherd, she was a twentieth-century role model for how a woman creative could do things her own way; unfettered, go out in all conditions to make her life’s work, to make her life work.