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Moving vista

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 8th October 2008

Joan Eardley
The Fleming Collection, 13 Berkeley Street, London W1, until 20 December

Born in Sussex, but moving to Glasgow when she was 18, Eardley based the rest of her short life in Scotland, and it is there that her reputation stands highest. The exhibition at the Fleming Collection has been produced in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland, which have loaned a number of works. However, this is a small show (though a welcome one), consisting only of a dozen paintings upstairs, and nine downstairs with a wall cabinet of drawings and a group of large photos of the artist. It gives only a taste of Eardley’s achievements. I admire what the Fleming Collection tries to do, but it must be said that the lighting in the gallery leaves a lot to be desired. Downlighters may be discreet, but they tend to leave great pools of shadow which don’t exactly elucidate the paintings.

The show begins with an early self-portrait from 1943, the paint very patchy and thinly applied. This understatement is surprisingly effective, though it was not a mode that Eardley pursued. Next to it hangs a typical mature landscape entitled ‘Field of Barley by the Sea’, constructed in heavily worked impasto, the paint driven hard in surging movements across the surface. There’s a strong sense of abstraction in the disposition of the masses and the colour relationships (blues and reds amid the more expected duns and greens). Next to it is the famous ‘Seeded Grasses and Daisies’ (1960), borrowed from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, with real flowers and stalks collaged into the paint. (You can’t get more ‘realistic’ than that.) This in turn is followed by the luscious paintwork of ‘Summer Fields’ (c.1961).