Artist Joan Eardley

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1:08Welcome to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service, the programme that investigates the creative process. I'm Antonia Quirk, and this edition is unusual in that its subject has been dead some 60 years. They don't take much encouraging to come up and be painted. They don't pose. They usually come up and say, will you paint me? From the 1940s to the early 1960s, the Scottish artist Joan Eardley painted portraits of children and wild land and seascapes. These nature paintings were intensely created, mostly outdoors in all weathers. Joan applied oil paint with tremendous vigour and dynamism often leaving bits of sand or plants embedded in the canvas These paintings are large and full of drama Erdley was not an abstract artist You always know what you're looking at when you see her work It's clearly a field of flowers or a stormy sea but her canvases can seem almost abstract because they're so layered and sculptural prolific collectible and on the cusp of global success Joan died of breast cancer in 1963 aged just 42 I suppose I'm essentially a romantic I believe in emotion that you get from what your eyes show you and what you feel about certain things a new exhibition Joan Eardley the nature of painting has opened at the National Galleries of Scotland in the capital city of Edinburgh.

2:56Eardley's work has been shown here before but for the first time it's been placed next to some of the landmark paintings in the gallery's extensive collection. I joined the exhibition's curator Kerry Gledhill as she brings Joan Eardley's life and work to the walls of the gallery finding connections in her working practice, preoccupations and spirit with artists such as Claude Monet, foundational member of the Impressionist movement, who worked in France from the 1850s to the 1920s, painting poppies, gardens, haystacks, water lilies and beaches, rippling with light-filled greens and yellows. I really love those juxtapositions.

3:38I love showing historic works next to contemporary works and just reminding people that it is a continuum. It's just artists trying to make sense of the world through pain. At the beginning of this year in art podcasts and in newspapers this exhibition was flagged as one of the most celebratory and anticipated of 2026. You seem quite euphoric today.

4:08Is it delirium? It might be delirium yesterday was very busy and I'm quite tired so yeah it could be It could be delirium. It's an exhibition that stands as a profound declaration of confidence in an artist who has always been appreciated in Scotland, but whose name ought to be known worldwide as one of the most important female artists of the 20th century. Joan Eardley, this exhibition shouts, is one of the greats.

4:40It's January 2026, and I am in Edinburgh. Just outside the National Galleries of Scotland Modern 2 building, which is the home of modern and surrealist art. It is a bleak, stark, wintry day. Everything, the trees, the sky, feels quiet and shuttered and waiting the winter out. Inside this building, Kerry is very much at work. She's been preparing, amongst other things, the walls for the exhibition. I'm just going to go and try to find her.

5:22Kerry, hiya. Hi. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Hi. So we've come into Modern 2, and we're in the spaces where the work's going to be shown. Describe the colour that you've painted the walls. We chose a sort of really quite rich terracotta colour for this room, which is where the landscapes and seascapes are going to be hung, which was partly to do with that colour cropping up in a lot of the works that are going to be on the walls in this room in just, like, tiny little splashes and details. It's wonderful. I wonder how much of a risk you think you take when you choose a colour this bold.

6:03Oh, it's quite nerve-wracking, but I think once the lighting is done, and it makes a massive difference, actually. You can afford to be much bolder in a gallery than you would perhaps be at home. So we're opening a box of Joan Erdely's, and it's full of postcards. Yeah, it's absolutely stuffed full of postcards. So we've got Renoir and quite a lot of Velasquez in here, but you can see immediately that there's such a breadth of art that she's looking at. There are images here from the National Gallery and lots of postcards from the British Museum. There's a beautiful one of a robin there. Yeah, it's that, I don't know, that's just a little bird.

6:47There's postcards of sculpture here and images of ancient ruins. Joan had many varied influences, going right back to her time as star pupil at art school in Glasgow, Scotland's largest city. From her 30s to the end of her life, Joan lived mostly in the fishing village of Catiline on the remote east coast of Scotland. Here she would stand for weeks down by the shore while the rain turned to sun and then rain again. In Scotland, the weather is almost always against you. Well, I very often find I will take my paints to a certain place which has moved me and I begin to paint there. and I find by perhaps the end of the summer, I haven't moved from that place.

7:37I've worn a kind of mark in the ground. There's no grass left. Kerry, can you remember when you first saw an Eardley? So my mum's from Kirkcaldy and Kirkcaldy Art Gallery acquired an Eardley painting, a seascape called Breaking Wave in 1973 and my mum had a poster illustrating this work She had it in the house all the time when I was growing up. And I was quizzing her, I was going, like, didn't you have a poster? Was there an exhibition? What was that? But that's one of these big square seascapes over a metre across. It's a very dramatic work. I think she's so much a part of Scottish painting.

8:25and I grew up surrounded by this and going to these public collections when I was a kid.

8:38And there have been exhibitions of her work at the galleries before. What is different about this one and why do it now? What we were looking for were synergies, the thread that runs through landscape painting and trying to find out what she was looking at and what she found interesting and finding those connections. She's such a key Scottish artist. Her work is so visceral and accessible and modern and overwhelming. Why is she not a household name? there are very few artists who are really household names there's a massive fan base in Scotland particularly and certainly a pride I think in her being a Scottish artist I mean she was born in England but her mother was Scottish and she spent all of her working life here and the way that she approached her work was incredibly single-minded and I've talked a lot about this idea of showing the truth of real people's lives and real experience of nature and I am hoping that lots of people are going to come and see the exhibition because I know that lots of people love her.

10:01So many people passionately love Herdly. Yeah really really enthusiastically love her

10:14I'm looking at the moment at a 1962 painting called Seascape, Foam and Blue Sky and I'm looking at it on my screen and zooming in I can't wait to see it on the wall it's incredibly roughly executed she's obviously painting outside in wild weather and there's all kinds of detritus on the surface of the board so that it looks like there's sand and grit and other things that I can't really identify it's incredibly rough but it just gives such a good impression of the wildness of the situation that she's in the sea spray and the sea as it's being whipped up by the wind

10:58I think you've got to know something before you paint it, you can't just go I can't just go and say well this is an interesting building I'm going to paint it or this is an interesting head I want to paint it I have to go much more deeply before I really got to grips

11:21I'm writing labels today and it seems to all be about artists and nature so I'm looking at Monet, Graydenstack's Snow Effect from 1891 and I found a juicy quote where he says, I only know that I do what I can to render what I feel when facing nature and that more often than not when I try to do so I completely forget the most basic rules of painting, if indeed there are any. And I just thought that was a great line to use in the context of the Eardley show because those rules of painting just don't apply to her. She really is so instinctive and it comes from that. And I suppose the most obvious sympathy between what Airdley's doing and the work of the Impressionists, including Moni, is the idea of painting outdoors.

12:10But I think it goes deeper than that. And I think that quote really kind of summarises what I'm trying to get at.

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13:17I ain't being vain. I just am special.

13:46like investing, home buying and choosing credit cards with clear research-backed insights. No jargon, no misinformation. Make your next financial move with confidence. Follow NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast on your favourite podcast app. You're listening to the documentary In the Studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Antonia Quirk and I'm following gallery curator Kerry Gledhill as she opens a new exhibition of the work of pivotal Scottish artist Joan Eardley.

14:23I'm on a little train travelling from the west coast of Scotland where I live, east, to Edinburgh and the gallery where Kerry is deep into the installation of the exhibition now. The rest of the UK is firmly into spring. But up here, there's lots of snow on the hills still, but daffodils and primrose and catkins and then great waves of hailstones moving across the lochs and the forests. It's really visceral and verdant. And it's very, very Joan Urdley. I'm going to be looking at some of her large landscape paintings today. These are scenes of snow and then tangles of flowers and fields and crops and earth, mud, roots, all done in thick oil paint.

15:19And I'm also going to watch a painting of Claude Monet's being unwrapped and hung in that same room. So it's a really exciting day. but a long and cold highland journey to get there.

15:41When I get to the gallery, Kerry is overseeing the hanging of Joan's large landscape paintings in the room with terracotta walls. We stand in front of Catiline in Winter from 1963. It's really moving to see it in person. it emanates a powerful, pewter kind of light. There's a little row of cottages, a country lane covered in snow and a low-hanging moon. I mean, it looks so complicated. What can this tell us about the way she worked? Because it's gouged and scooped. And describe how she worked for us. Well, I think she worked incredibly quickly, actually, and quite sort of ferociously. There's a little bit of film footage of her working in the early 1960s 1960s from a film called Three Scottish Artists and you can see her almost kind of like attacking a canvas.

16:32I read she was a storm chaser and so when she heard that bad weather was coming in she'd get on her motorbike. Yeah she bought herself a little scooter so that it was easier to transport her boards around and her paints and stuff and she could move around more freely and yeah she would set off and she she talks a lot about storms and big what she calls big seas and those were her favourite conditions to work in. And did she really weigh her canvases down with an old anchor? Yeah, yeah, an anchor at one point, but rocks as well so that they didn't blow away. The moon I love. Yeah, the moon is this sort of green, yellow, pale...

17:13It's so amazing seeing it this close. Yeah. Look at this great mound of paint here. I think people have found beetles and all kinds of things in our painting. Yeah, yeah. Which had obviously flown and got stuck. Poor thing. It just goes to show, you never know what you're going to find on the surface here. It's quite addictive, isn't it? You could spend all day. Yeah, you could spend hours looking at this. I've seen photographs of her working. Her girlfriend took a lot of those photographs, is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Audrey Walker was actually quite an accomplished photographer and they met, I think, in 1952.

17:51And she was always very open about being a lesbian, wasn't she? As open as she could be, I think. I think she was open with good friends. But, you know, I think you've got to remember that this was 1950s, 1960s. This was a time when it wasn't acceptable to be a lesbian. It was really a tough thing to be open about.

18:14Joan's painting seeded grasses and daisies, September. from 1960, is hanging in here too. It's painted as though we're right down, almost in the soil. It's so encrusted with stalks and flower heads. It looks like the fossilised remains of an exquisite animal. And there's also a startling 1944 painting called Landscape of the Vernal Equinox nearby. It's by the British artist Paul Nash. He was a photographer, an illustrator, and a surrealist artist with a great love of certain hills in the south-east of England. And in this painting, a sun and moon hang simultaneously in the sky above the site of an Iron Age hill fort.

18:58And there's one more masterpiece left to hang.

19:06So, unwrapping a Monet. I'm just going to lift it to where it's going on the wall. I'm going to get the sounds of the unwrapping actually it's quite nice paper tape sounds this is poetry in motion watching very well practised colleagues handling things like this to get in the way of money we're going to enjoy just turning it around so that we can see the image and there it is

19:43Wow. So, Kerry, this is? So this is Claude Monet's Grainstacks Snow Effect, which was painted in 1891. And it was a really obvious choice for this show because what Monet and the other Impressionists have in common with Airdley was their love of painting outdoors. so what we see is two grain stacks in the centre of the image which are in quite deep shadow and the shadows are painted in blues the haystacks themselves are dark oranges and yellows and pinks and blues the snow isn't white in this anywhere i don't think it's pale pink and pale blue and pale yellows and you get a sense of a sort of ethereal landscape spreading out behind them but really the main focus is the haystacks themselves.

20:37Let's get up close to it and look at the brushwork. Yeah and it's great to look at it up close as well because some of the there's really thick impasto here and you know there's a real sort of sense of the paint being laid down you can see the the brush marks out towards the edges the The paint gets a little bit thinner, but it's similar to some of the early paintings. You could be describing the same thing. The surface is really almost two-dimensional when you get close to it.

21:18All of Kerry's choices in this room both clarify and suggest. Those synergies she talked about when I first met her are now so clear. Hanging Joan's seeded grass and daisies in front of Paul Nash's strange equinox painting doesn't just bring out the folk art elements of Joan's work, but hints at something more primal, something almost semi-pagan. And Monet, of course, with that curious apricot snow. In their different ways, these artists reach so enigmatically into the rhythms of nature, it's like a room full of visionary mystics. and I think you can even hear that too in Joan's almost otherworldly voice in the few BBC Archive recordings we've heard through this programme.

22:04The more you try, the more you think of new things, new ways of doing this particular subject and so you just go on and on or you might just turn around in the middle of doing a certain painting and you see something else and you run back and get another canvas and try and do that but it's still the same spot, really, and it's probably the same feeling that you're trying to grasp. Last day of March, the press launch. Modern Two is open again, and at last, spring sun floods the windows. Kerry is giving tours to journalists, and I spot Joan's niece, Anne, in the crowd. Is the family very proud of her?

22:52Oh, yes, yes. Oh, very much so. And I think the sad thing of her dying so young when she was just breaking into the possibly international art world because her big show in London was a huge success, you know, just months before she died. So that would have been a stepping stone into a bigger world. And you always wonder, where would she have moved from and where would it have gone? I think it was simply because she died just at that point. She hadn't become the household name. She would have within a couple of years, perhaps. I mean, I love her, the big wave painting there. That's just one of my favourites.

23:32They make you happy looking at the paintings? Oh, yes, yes. When I catch up with Kerry, I ask her about Joan's final months. So she went to London in May 1963 for the opening of her solo show at Rowan Browsendal Banco and she wrote to Lil Nielsen, who she was in a relationship with at the time, about her bosom and problems with her bosom. And I believe she visited a doctor in London. And then when she came back to Glasgow, also went to the doctor. But I think possibly because she'd been quite obviously wrapped up in the preparation for the show and everything, she had maybe neglected it a little bit.

24:15And of course now we know that although the primary cancer was breast cancer, it had moved into her brain. and so by the end of her life she was starting to lose her sight and was very, very ill. And there are letters that she wrote while she was in hospital in that last month that are really heartbreaking to read. Letter to Audrey Walker, June 1963, from Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. Wee dear person, that's me in bed. Nice wee side ward with feels to be seen out of the window so that part is okay, a good beginning I hope. though I haven't much hope. We dear person, we are all right. I don't think I can face phoning you but only because I'm afraid I'll break down.

25:01It's a bit misty but apparently you can see the sea when it's clear. Letter to Audrey Walker, summer 1963. Just you be really all right, my wee dear and not to worry about me for there's nothing can be done.

25:19She died in August 1963 and her ashes were scattered on the shore at Catterline so she went back to the place that she loved the best, I think

25:33I believe in what the subject makes you do yes, I do believe in a subject in the sense that it's your starting point and I suppose I'm essentially a romantic. I believe in the sort of emotion that you get from what your eyes show you and what you feel about certain things. The show opens to the public in a couple of days and your work is done. Yeah. How has it been? it's been such a pleasure to spend some proper time with Airdley herself and her work and I feel like I've spent time with her because I've been reading her letters and rereading them and but it's also been a joy to look at the rest of the collection through her eyes and from her perspective and find those connections and conversations and draw that out as well and and I'm just looking over your shoulder at the morning and thinking how great it looks in here and how unusual it is for us to I mean we do make use of the whole of the National Collection but the opportunity to hang an earl next to a Claude Monet doesn't come up very often it's wonderful to have planned something and then for everybody to come together and make it happen and for it to come to fruition and for colleagues to come in and people to come in and see the things that I've been looking at.