Pete suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Moving vista

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 8th October 2008

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

Sensibly, the hang upstairs focuses on Eardley’s landscapes and seascapes, which are what most people who know her work want to see. The chaotic sea paintings don’t look very marine, more like melting snow on high moors, particularly ‘Winter Sea III’ and ‘Summer Sea’. The best of this group is ‘The Wave’ (1961), a completely non-naturalistic representation, like a long wall in its uncompromising horizontality. Here, Eardley attempts an equivalent image rather than anything overtly descriptive, and the result is highly effective.

Downstairs, there are three paintings of the street kids she liked to depict and a rather nasty picture of a naked man stretched out on a bed. The ink drawings in the wall cabinet have some of the vigour of early Bratby, particularly ‘Kitchen Sink and Cupboard’. The best paintings downstairs are the Cézannesque stove and the luxuriantly colourful landscape ‘Harvest’. Joan Eardley is not sufficiently well-known to contemporary English gallery-goers, but this exhibition will not change that. There needs to be a proper museum retrospective of her work, though I can’t imagine that happening given the present obsession with narcissistic youth and reheated conceptualism.

One painter who confronts landscape with a similar degree of colourful abstraction is James Judge (born 1958). I caught his latest show at the Adam Gallery in Cork Street, though it has now relocated to its branch at 13 John Street, Bath, where it runs from 13 to 28 October. His generalised landscapes, all horizons and distant incidents, marinate in synthetic hues. The further away from naturalism he gets, the more interesting, though this treatment makes the work look foreign. Not such rich, exotic colours on these grey shores, surely? But bold paintings guaranteed to lift the spirits, with a subtext of formal invention and subtlety that continues to intrigue long after the initial joyful response.