Summer Storm by Joan Eardley (1921-1963) captures a green field with blooming flowers and the suggestion of a small stream flowing through it, with a dark, cloudy sky above and the sun peaking out behind the clouds. Thick, layered strokes and clumping of paint allows Eardley to make flowers bloom off the board of the painting and helps capture the movement of the stream and wind through the grasses.The straight lines in the thickness of the paint and the cutting through of the layers to create highlights in the piece suggest Eardley used a palette knife to create more dimension to her work. The build of paint as suggestions of flowers with bright yellow and white colour and variability in paint strokes are possible influences of Abstract Expressionism that Eardley conveys in much of her work. Another consistency in her work is the dark, moody sky with muted tones of colour to convey an intense mood in the piece.

Eardley's later years were spent with half the year in Glasgow and the other half in Catterline, a fishing village on the northeast coast of Scotland. A focus of much of her work in this location is capturing storms as they would come in off the coast, present in this work with the grey skies and the way the flowers appear to blow in the wind. Storms and fields were both common subjects in much of Eardley's work from Catterline, as well as her shift from using canvas to board for oil paintings that way she could build up paint as she worked. Eardley's time at Catterline saw shifts in her subject and style of painting, as she spent some of her final months in the village as she passed away from breast cancer. 

Joan Eardley RSA, 1921-1963

Born in Warnham, Sussex, to Anglo-Scottish parents, and brought up in Lincoln and in Blackheath, London, Eardley studied art briefly at Goldsmiths College before moving to Glasgow with her mother and grandmother at the beginning of the Second World War. She trained at Glasgow School of Art under Hugh Adam Crawford before taking a wartime job as a joiner's labourer. In 1943 she graduated with both the Diploma prize for drawing and painting and the prize for portraiture.

Van Gogh, Vuillard and Bonnard influenced Eardley's early draughtsmanship and choice of domestic interiors. Henry Moore and early Italian renaissance masters brought a sculptural weight and humanity to the figure compositions. In 1947 Eardley resumed her art studies at Hospitalfield in Arbroath, under James Cowie, and the following year returned to Glasgow School of Art to pursue the post-diploma course awarded to her four years earlier. She was given two travelling scholarships and spent eight months visiting Paris, Venice, Florence, Siena and Rome. The sketches and compositions executed in France and Italy were shown at her first solo exhibition at Glasgow School of Art on her return in 1949.

In 1950 Eardley discovered the small fishing village of Catterline, near Stonehaven, Kincardineshire. From then on she divided her time between her studios in Glasgow and Catterline. The later gestural weather studies in chalk had much of the force of the Abstract Expressionists but never became totally abstract. The oils included collages layers of earth and vegetation under thick sweeps of paint.

A quiet, retiring person, Eardley pursued her art with single-minded purpose. Her style is individual and conforms to no particular schools. She was elected ARSA in 1955 and RSA in the spring of 1963 but died a few months later.