National Galleries of Scotland Children and Chalked Wall 3 Joan Eardley A6 Address Book

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For around 10 years, she drew and painted the Samsons, a family of 12 who lived in a two-bedroom tenement flat close to her studio. In the family, Eardley found ready child models of all ages and stages. She revelled in their energy and their physical quirks. She once said of Pat, one of the youngest girls, that she wasn't so interesting when she had her squint fixed. Eardley painted Pat and her younger sister Ann, many times. The squint which so interested her is clear in Children and Chalked Wall No. 2, a late work that also plays with a growing fascination with graffiti. You could call Byrne Scotland’s ultimate selfie artist. The artist, dramatist and stage-designer produced so many self-portraits, some of them exaggerated, caricatured, surreal, many psychologically intense. A whole room of 40 of these protean images are currently on display at the John Byrne – A Big Adventure exhibition at Kelvingrove Art Gallery. This early portrait is the one, however, we chose, being perhaps his most familiar Byrne, painted after his returning from California with a ‘Flower Power’ hippy vibe and said to be a tribute to an artist he admired: one of the best-known outsiders of modern art, Henri Rousseau. Your own favourite John Byrne selfie may be quite another. The final episode of the BBC’s The Story of Scottish Art recently aired on BBC Two Scotland – looking at how the last century has seen artists in Scotland exploring and questioning the theme of identity. The programme will look at Joan Eardley, whose painted portraits of children in deprived suburban Glasgow, and depictions of dramatic landscapes which chart the changes of season celebrate two distinct aspects of Scottish identity: the urban and the rural. Despite her untimely death at the age of 42, Eardley remains one of Scotland’s best loved artists. Jasper Johns’ new works at the Courtauld Gallery, Regrets, take inspiration from Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and the photographer John Deakin. The result is a powerful, if enigmatic exhibitionBut it all ended with sudden tragedy. Early in 1963, she felt unwell. She put off visiting the doctor. When she did so the diagnosis was breast cancer and it had spread too far. She died in August, aged 42. Her family scattered her ashes on the beach at Catterline, the subject of so many of her pictures. The exhibition at Ben Uri brings together five postwar artists, Joan Eardley, Sheila Fell, Eva Frankfurther, Josef Herman and LS Lowry, all of whom shared a common interest in working people and the underlying human condition

To celebrate thecentenary of the birth of Joan Eardley (1921–1963), a series of events led by the Scottish Women and the Arts Research Network (SWARN) in collaboration with the University of Glasgow (The Hunterian and Archives and Special Collections), The Glasgow School of Art, Paisley Museum and Art Gallery and Glasgow Women's Library will be taking place in 2021. Your studio seemed much further than a staircase away from the crowded, dirty road below. Further still from the tiny two-bedroom tenement which the twelve of us shared. It was there that we returned to our mother every evening; would offer her the day's little crayon sketches and watch her feed them, gratefully, into the fire. Not because she did not appreciate your talent, but because the nights were too cold, the walls too thin, to allow her the luxury of sentiment.

Frans Hals

Joan Kathleen Harding Eardley (18 May 1921 – 16 August 1963) was a British artist noted for her portraiture of street children in Glasgow and for her landscapes of the fishing village of Catterline and surroundings on the North-East coast of Scotland. One of Scotland's most enduringly popular artists, her career was cut short by breast cancer. Her artistic career had three distinct phases. The first was from 1940 when she enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art through to 1949 when she had a successful exhibition of paintings created while travelling in Italy. From 1950 to 1957, Eardley's work focused on the city of Glasgow and in particular the slum area of Townhead. In the late 1950s, while still living in Glasgow, she spent much time in Catterline before moving there permanently in 1961. During the last years of her life, seascapes and landscapes painted in and around Catterline dominated her output.