RSA Scottish Art

Summer Sea

Small web image of Summer SeaArtist: Joan Eardley
Title: Summer Sea
Year: c. 1962
Medium: oil on hardboard
Dimensions:
Suggested topic:
Source: RSA Diploma Collection
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Description: Joan Eardley is best known for her paintings of Glasgow tenements and street life, but later in her life she settled in the village of Catterline and devoted the remainder of her life to painting the sea and cornfields close by her cottage. Summer Sea was painted on the beach at Catterline. Using powerful brushstrokes, laden with thick paint, Eardley's painting is not only a recreation of the waves on the beach but a personal statement of her feelings about her oneness with her surroundings. Included amongst the layers of paint are scraps of paper and debris picked up from the beach, and as a result she makes tangible connections to the very spot from which she was working. The palette is cool, with mostly blues and black dominating the work. Tonally it encompasses a very broad range - the black shape at the bottom of the painting is especially dark and forbidding. Three horizontal bands dominate most of this painting. Subtle breaks in a line and gentle variations of shape define the direction of the viewer's eye. Eardley has picked a spot which offers very little visual information, but which clearly had a strong resonance for her. A distant horizon, waves, a dark foreground shape - all of these features are suggested in paint which shows very little detail or shape.This scene of a swelling sea suggests a great love for the ocean and the beach. This place attracted Eardley so much that she painted the sea even when there was nothing more recognisable to look at than sky and water. Eardley is more concerned here with depicting a feeling of the place rather than its appearance. The painting has abstract qualities, but mostly it sums up a spiritual and aesthetic attitude towards a wild place.