Joan Eardley and the Untidy, Tidal Nature of Painting

The time has come for what I am doing now. Which is pretty well bashing at painting all the time. A sort of reckless kind of bashing. And probably useless from any material point of view—but I know necessary to myself.
—Joan Eardley, letter to Audrey Walker from Catterline, Scotland, 1955¹

Any painter must know what a struggle painting can be. I mean sheer bloody battle with the actual medium.
—Audrey Walker, unpublished memoir on Joan Eardley, circa 1964²

What materials were available to a painter in 1950s Scotland? And how did she harness them?

In the shadow of a world-shattering war, an artist might use her supplies with the muscle memory of rationing and scarcity or with newfound abandon; she might prefer the comfort of the same traditional oils and canvas she has always used; she might experiment with the futuristic slick of new house paints or surfaces such as compressed-wood hardboards.

For Joan Eardley, whose painting practice matured in Scotland during the post-World War II period, all the above apply. After moving to northwest Glasgow with her mother and sister in 1940, Eardley spent most of that decade as a student at the Glasgow School of Art, with a wartime stint as an apprentice joiner at a boatyard, painting camouflage on landing craft. By 1949, she was exhibiting and selling artworks and was a professional member of the Society of Scottish Artists. Her lamentably brief career ended in 1963, when she died of breast cancer at the age of forty-two, three months after being elected to the Royal Scottish Academy.³ Eardley’s trajectory as a working painter paralleled the waning days of material rations in Britain and a global groundswell in applied sciences: throughout the 1950s, the look, feel, and chemistry of painting and building materials of all kinds were rapidly diversifying. The specialized scientific labor force, laboratories, and instruments that, during the war, had surged with funding to develop alternatives for scarce raw materials, pivoted their research to postwar commercial enterprises. Products such as synthetic resin paints or artificial construction boards used by industrial tradespeople found new markets in private consumers, including artists. Although Eardley and her peers had been trained using the long-dominant materials of European painting practice—oils and canvas—the reality of many artists’ studios was more experimental. The rising popularity of gloss house paint at the time has been especially well documented.⁴ Today, painting conservators consider this decade to have been the effective shifting point from “modern” to “contemporary” practices because of the sharp increase in artists’ use of nontraditional supplies.⁵

Material exploration and physical rigor defined Eardley’s professional career. Throughout the 1950s, she frequently shuttled between her two studios: a dusty workshop in a Glasgow tenement, and a wind-blown shack in the village of Catterline, skirting the North Sea. Working daily, indoors or outdoors, even during blizzards, she nursed a compulsion to draw and paint from observation. Her gestural, flickering brushwork thrived on scenes of evasive, ephemeral color:

Certainly the coldest and worst day of the year—a most exciting day too, with every variation of colour—black sea, bright green striped sea—brown sea yellow sea—and no sea … Extraordinary storm cloud formations too … I had to stick to one mood and position—when all the time I was itching to turn hither and thither.⁶

Eardley calmed her impatient eyes with chalk, pastel, paint, paper, canvas—each technical choice carried sensory value. She sometimes embedded elements from her immediate environment into sticky paint: newspaper, foil candy wrappers, plant matter. The few monographs and published essays on Joan Eardley include useful material details like these, but they are primarily contextualized through biography or framed as risky experiments. Eardley’s layered materials do pose significant questions about the long-term care—and, in turn, visibility—of her work. But what if they also reveal deeper nuances within the nature of postwar artistic experimentation?

This period in painting is often characterized by macroscopic boundaries such as traditional or contemporary, realism or abstraction, before or after. But, as a manual craft, painting is horizontal and sprawling—these large transitions contain much smaller, messier units of measure. From the point of view of a studio, a canvas, a pigment particle, the traditions and technologies of a painter’s daily labor are perpetually remade; her toolkit reflects local economies and the swell of global industries alike. Many accounts refer to Eardley’s use of house or boat paints, of mixing beach sand or grit into her paint, and of grinding her own pigments by hand. These details suggest diverse methods, textures, and supplies, yet they are rarely elaborated. Her artworks, like many of her archived letters, are often approximately dated, resisting a precise linear chronology.⁷ Eardley’s hard-won visual vocabulary seems less of a pronounced shift than a stretching, curling of painting practices, built through material trial and error, enabled by new and old technologies in tandem—a relentless tide that pushed forward as much as it pulled from what came before.

Little is known for certain about Joan Eardley’s materials. My research is an initial step to compile, question, and record.

Leveraging archival and technical approaches, this study is the result of sustained engagement with Eardley’s paintings as primary sources. Over three months in 2021, I conducted a detailed examination of three paintings from approximately 1956–58: Glasgow Close, oil paint on re-stretched canvas; and Winter Sea III and Stacks at Evening, both oil paint on industrial hardboard (figs. 1–3). These represent each of her studios, and a range of scales, mark-making, and substrates. In affiliation with The Hunterian and the Kelvin Centre for Conservation and Cultural Heritage Research, I examined each painting with scientific imaging and analysis tools that illuminate physical and chemical properties such as microscopic surface detail, paint layer structure, or pigment composition.⁸ I viewed them outside their frames, seeking raw edges or manufacturers’ marks.⁹ The research presented here considers the paintings from the time they were made, but acknowledges that they have led independent lives for much longer, having been stored, displayed, and handled by many people in various environments since they left Eardley’s studio. To help me parse this boundary, and for further material insights, I reviewed conservation and curatorial records for these three and similar paintings.¹⁰

Throughout, I sought Joan Eardley’s own perspective and lived experience through archival letters, interviews, and photos. One source merits particular attention, Lady Audrey Walker, a photographer who met Eardley in 1952; the two developed an intimate bond of creative reciprocity and often worked alongside each other. Walker’s archived photographs are in many cases the only visual record of the spaces they occupied, and their correspondence provides valuable insight into Eardley’s daily work.¹¹

In the following detailed vignettes, this article uses the three selected paintings as starting points for discussion of Eardley’s multifaceted practice during the 1950s. Her studios are explored as physical structures and complex ecosystems within which her methods bloomed; in-depth examination of the paintings highlight their substrates, ground layers, and paint layers; close observation of brushstrokes and surfaces reveal the interaction between environment, materials, and her body’s gesture. Considered within their historical context of craft technologies in transition, these insights begin to uncover the subtleties of an artist’s working process: the many daily or seasonal negotiations she makes with supplies, suppliers, neighbors, friends, finances, health and safety, transportation, geography, weather, nature, and even insects, which all define the creation of a painting and leave traces in its final form.

Eardley’s studio walls were porous to the communities and environment around her. She is broadly categorized as a painter of landscapes, seascapes, street scenes, and portraits, but these were not simply pictorial “subjects”, or inert nouns she recorded at distance; rather, they were energetic verbs that shared a symbiotic relationship with her practice. Eardley anchored her easel amid swirls of chattery children or frothing waves. Tenement blocks and haystacks exhaled around her. Oil paint and other artists’ materials mingled with candy wrappers, beach sand, seeds, grit, and grasses. Her recycled canvases and industrial boards flexed with seasonal humidity or gale force winds.¹²

Ad hoc workspaces from her student days were not entirely dissimilar from those of her mature career. While on a travel scholarship through Italy and France, Eardley mailed sketches to her mother showing her pension rooms-turned-studios. In Venice, her laundry hung just above her paints and brushes, drawings were strewn across the spare bed, canvases leaned against hanging coats, and “odd little tiny paintings” rest on the doorframe (figs. 4 and 5).¹³ In another sketch, two drawings in progress are pinned to the scant wall space while another is on the floor, “held down by shoes” (fig. 6).¹⁴ A traveling art student from Edinburgh remarked of Eardley’s room: “Both of [the beds] and everything else … covered with drawings and canvases. It smelt of turps and was very homely”.¹⁵ Later that year, 1949, she rented workspace in the dense Townhead district of central Glasgow. It was a spare room in a shared tenement attic that smelled strongly of glue from her bookbinder and brushmaker neighbors below. She painted the studio walls—and a few drawings—with vibrant blue distemper and sketched on invoice paper from the bookbindery.¹⁶

Eardley once reflected, “I do feel the more you know of something, the more you can get out of it, the more it gives to you”.¹⁷ The physicality of Eardley’s work begins with the give and take of her studio environments.

Townhead

In 1953 Eardley moved her supplies to her first independent space, a former photographer’s studio on St. James Road in Townhead, which she maintained until her death. The streets and buildings she navigated were a billowing congestion of industry and family life: laborers, craftspeople, children, cars, clamor, and pollution. Townhead’s sandstone tenements were mired in a century of soot and often clouded by grey-green smog. Eardley commented of the light quality, “Glasgow feels as if it has a sort of lid on top of it”.¹⁸ Smoke abatement measures from the Clean Air Act took appreciable effect only after 1959.¹⁹ The area was also effectively a construction site. Some buildings were already crumbling while zealous city planners marked the rest for bulldozing. Shortly after Eardley died, her vibrant community was replaced by a roaring asphalt motorway and concrete tower blocks.²⁰

Eardley’s top-floor studio was wedge-shaped, with flaking walls and paint-splattered floors (fig. 7). It had no electricity, but she maximized daylight from the ample glass ceilings. She sketched outdoors on the street and finished paintings indoors.²¹ Photos and video footage show numerous sketches hanging from beams or leaning against walls; various paint-covered stools and tables held unmarked jars, bottles, and cans filled with brushes. Her neighbors’ children played and posed in the studio, the floor around them strewn with rags, bottles, and open pots (figs. 8–10). This was no space for controlled portrait sitting. The studio was above a scrap-metal shop, overlooking a busy road corner teeming with local children, street debris, wall graffiti, and exhaust fumes—all of which eventually swept themselves upstairs.

Glasgow Close suggests as much (see fig. 1). It depicts a sandstone tenement in a nearly collapsing, curling perspective. Its tall doorway and window are hinged open like crossed eyes. The warm- and cool-grey masonry is interrupted by three small, vibrant figures: a tumble of cornflower blue and blonde leans out of the window facing down toward a figure who stands against the doorway in a brick-red dress. Viewed under a stereomicroscope, the painting shows tiny particles of environmental debris frozen in brushstrokes, stucco-like, across its surface (figs. 11–14). Their wonky geometry mimics fractals of the tenement’s chunky stone facade. “Grit” is sometimes cited alongside oil paint in written captions of Eardley’s works, although it’s unclear if this microscopic level of debris was intentional or environmental. Perhaps both.

Catterline

An artist friend first brought Eardley to the crescent-shaped harbor of Catterline in 1950 and she returned with increasing frequency for the rest of her life (fig. 15).²² Catterline was a remote, aging fishing village, with a cliffside string of roughly thirty whitewashed homes and about as many residents. At the southernmost end, exposed to fierce winds, was No. 1 The Row, a basic shelter Eardley rented as her studio in 1954. She once wrote, “all the day the wind has been tearing off the sea, getting worse and worse, and tonight poor little No. 1 is getting rocketed about. Every now and then, by an extra hard blast of wind, the door is blown open, and what amounts to a bucket full of rain, sloshed in through the open door”.²³ Undeterred by the lack of floors, roof, plumbing, and electricity, Eardley made No. 1 habitable enough until she bought nearby No. 18 in 1959. The latter became home while the former remained a workspace.²⁴

Unlike in Townhead, Eardley painted primarily outdoors in Catterline. She shared this boundaryless workspace with neighbors, farmers, or fisherfolk, whom she knew well, but her work responded more to the wild sky, sea, and fields as she immersed herself and her easel:

The North East,—it’s just vast waste and vast seas, vast areas of cliff—you’ve just got to paint it. I very often find I will take my paints to a certain place which has moved me and I’ll begin to paint there and I find by perhaps the end of the summer I haven’t moved from that place. My paints are still there. I’ve worn a kind of mark in the ground—no grass left!—and I just leave my paints there overnight and eventually it seems to have built up this other table and generally a studio seems to have arrived outside and that seems to be how I work.²⁵

Photographs show Eardley with large paintings propped low on folding easels. Grass or tide’s edge grazed (or barely avoided) the paint surface—she would have had to crouch to paint lower passages. Inland, she perched her wooden tray palette above a knee-high wood crate, a few open cans or jars rest on top as she held a palette knife, oily rag, and a wide house-painting brush (fig. 16). She tied a stone to the back of her easel for counterweight. In one photo by the sea, she holds a long palette knife and balances a tray over a tripod at hip height. Various-sized cans sit close to her feet, with what appear to be small tubes of paint and groups of long-handled brushes strewn across the muddy ground on either side of her; the sea spray looks palpable (fig. 17).

She painted like this all day, year-round. Numerous letters detail her battles with the elements, as she ran in and out with her supplies between blizzards or attached an anchor to her easel and left it “half buried in the snow”.²⁶ She wrote to Audrey Walker about waiting for the tide to turn and setting up on the shore: “before I had got my painting on easel a huge wave came and washed right over my feet and up to my calves. This is only to tell you how strong my boots are—not to frighten you”.²⁷ Heavy rain seemed to be the only thing that drove her practice indoors.²⁸

Winter Sea III is a frenetic view of the harbor, its dock jutting defiantly from dark rocks into roiling grey, white, and steely blue waves (see fig. 2). Eardley’s viewpoint was looking down from atop the grassy cliffside. In the upper center of the painting, stereomicroscopy reveals an intact beetle, 2.5 mm long, partially submerged in a grey-blue brushstroke (fig. 18). It landed while she painted, its wings enveloped by viscous wet paint. Identified as a rove beetle of the Omalium species, this insect lives in areas with decaying plant matter, including coastal shorelines, where they can be found among seaweed, driftwood, or decomposing vegetation.²⁹

The lower right surface of the painting contains an accumulation of scattered tiny particles in various shades of brown and beige (fig. 19). Eardley was known to embed sand in her paint mixtures; however, under microscopic analysis, none of these particles resemble mineral quartz, mica, or other beach sand material. One, removed from the painting’s far edge as a sample for detailed study, appears organic rather than mineral: its wood-like striations suggest a carbon-based structure (fig. 20).³⁰ The particles that found their way onto her paintings while she painted might be windblown ash or seaweed detritus. Eardley once described working on the cliffside: “Greyness and blowing swirling mists—and latterly a strong wind blowing from the south blowing up great froths of whiteness off the sea, like soapsuds onto the field behind our wee house”.³¹

On the back of Glasgow Close is an unfinished landscape entirely unlike Winter Sea III: a grey-brown cottage and white wall frame a rigid ocean view between them (fig. 21). It is unmistakably Catterline, possibly dated around 1952–54.³² The paint is anemic. Diluted and smeared in parts, it was applied in a color-blocked style indicative of her more measured indoor practice. Two drawings at the Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Collection depict the same composition with annotated reference notes in Eardley’s hand (“indigo sky”, “raw umber”, “move wall a little”).³³ These mnemonic sketches were common for Eardley, but the canvas itself remains an unusual material link between her city and seaside environments. Did she use her notes to paint remotely from Glasgow? How often did she shuttle supplies and sketches between studios?

Eardley’s letters rarely name specific materials or suppliers, so between her urban and rural access points—each with its own local economy—her potential materials are exponentially vast. The artists’ supplier she most likely frequented in Glasgow was Miller’s Drawing Materials, a favorite haunt for art students.³⁴ From Glasgow to Catterline, a roughly 270-kilometer journey, Eardley travelled by train to Aberdeen, then transferred to the town of Stonehaven, where she was retrieved by car or rode her own scooter the remaining 9 kilometers to the coast. Once there, basic provisions were over a kilometer away, though neighbors often pooled or traded goods among themselves. Her letters mention the occasional “good wee expedition to Aberdeen” to buy paints and sailcloth at an undisclosed shop.³⁵ These might just as easily have been materials for artwork as for studio repair work. Aberdeen was a major urban center, but Eardley’s movements there are not well documented. In general, she was not rooted to artists’ suppliers alone, nor to any single source. Following her commute back and forth, the physical components of her paintings begin to trace a network of anonymous community suppliers across Glasgow, Aberdeen, Stonehaven, and Catterline. These, in turn, were linked to larger postwar global economies in flux.

Throughout Eardley’s professional career, material change was unavoidable, underpinned by expanding chemical industries and shifting supply chains. Substrates that had hardly changed for centuries—canvases spun from plant fibers such as linen and hemp, or panels planed from hardwood—became more expensive and were harder to find compared to cotton and synthetic fabrics or to construction boards made from processed wood pulp.³⁶ Meanwhile, the physical and chemical properties of paints themselves became seemingly unlimited, driven largely by innovations in solvents and binding media (or binders—the viscous oils or resins that bond to colored pigment particles and create a paint film). Natural tree resins, like dammar, and plant-derived oils, like linseed and poppy, were the long-dominant binders for paints and coatings made for artists and tradespeople alike. By midcentury, industrial paints broke stride: improved synthetic binders such as alkyds, acrylics, and polyvinyl acetates allowed greater durability, mass production, and standardization. Ambitious manufacturers like Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) in the United Kingdom, or the Rohm and Haas Company and DuPont in the United States, developed these new resins on an unprecedented global scale. At ICI alone, the number of technicians researching paints and plastics grew from 25 in 1938 to 123 in 1952.³⁷

And, yet, traditional media were not entirely displaced, least of all during this period of transition. Artists still used oils even as they embraced new commercial-grade paints, multiplying the textures, sheen, viscosity, and movement that could be manipulated from each color. Eardley was attuned to contemporary practices, and some conservation records of her paintings propose that gloss house paint was used alongside traditional oils, but the extent to which she mixed media is unknown.

Eardley’s drawing practice is a useful lens for understanding how she utilized materials. An incessant draughtswoman, she often layered multiple media such as gouache, pastel, chalk, and watercolor, and used whatever paper was nearby. She drew on invoice papers and sandpaper, sometimes drafting across different sheets patched together as the sketch outgrew its original dimensions. Perhaps as a consequence of her artistic training during wartime rationing and inflation, Eardley remained resourceful and frugal with materials throughout her career, despite her growing income from gallery sales (interestingly, at her death, she owned stock in ICI).³⁸ Her relentless, immersive routine suggests a keen sensitivity to exploration, control, and serendipity.

Eardley’s decision-making and options can be staggering to consider. The findings and reflections presented here aim to narrow, rather than define, an understanding of her painting materials, focusing on substrates (canvas and board), ground layers, and two often cited characteristics of Eardley’s palette, particularly in Catterline: her use of boat paint and of hand-ground pigments.³⁹

Canvas and board

Eardley required a large supply of substrates. She worked on multiple pieces at any given time, griping about “blasted great boards sticking out everywhere” in her Catterline cottage.⁴⁰ In one letter she describes painting all day, then moving spots at around six o’clock “to paint the evening sky … I bashed away painting sunsets until about 8 o’clock, did three”.⁴¹ A bout like this likely produced Stacks at Evening (see fig. 3). Measuring 11 × 16 cm, the tiny board is a manageable scale for fast multiples. A nearly identical piece, Autumn Sky, Catterline, in the Gracefield Arts Centre collection (Dumfries and Galloway Council), is cut to a wider format, suggesting compositional tests (fig. 22).⁴²

It is not uncommon for her finished paintings, primarily canvases, to hide an abandoned effort on the reverse side. Cordelia Oliver, a fellow art student and later biographer of Eardley, wrote of an early painting that was “no doubt under some later painting, for those were difficult times with new canvas often unobtainable”.⁴³ High-quality linen was especially dear. In the United Kingdom, the artists’ supplier Winsor & Newton wrested a “special allocation of flax yarns” during the war to make a limited supply of linen canvases; production levels never rebounded afterward.⁴⁴

The canvas for Glasgow Close is a plain weave of either linen or hemp fibers.⁴⁵ It has been reused, re-stretched and resized. First, the Catterline scene (see fig. 21) was flipped and stretched to provide a clean surface for the Glasgow composition. This too underwent a size alteration, which is revealed when examined outside of its frame: the left side of the composition continues—fully painted—past the front edge of the picture plane, wrapping around the stretcher bar. Holes from former tacking marks are visible along the bottom stretcher (figs. 23 and 24). Because the paint only extends past the left edge, the original composition must have started at a wider format, possibly horizontal or square, before being cropped to its present vertical at some point in the painting’s lifetime.

In Catterline, Eardley opted for boards more often than canvas.⁴⁶ Winter Sea III and Stacks at Evening are painted on 3 mm thick hardboard (also called wallboard), made primarily for industrial use in building and construction projects. Hardboard was a marvel of twentieth-century chemistry and engineering: sawmill waste that was previously discarded or burned was instead ground or pulped, and the natural lignin in lumber was converted into a bonding material for densely packed wood pulp. This created strong, affordable boards that became ubiquitous during the postwar building boom.⁴⁷ In a letter to Audrey Walker, Eardley requested hardboard from “your joiner—or any joiner”; she also sourced them from a joiner in Stonehaven.⁴⁸

On the back of Winter Sea III, a black stamp reads “Royal Board” with a triangular logo and “Made in Sweden” below (figs. 25 and 26). Royal Board was a product of ASSI (Aktiebolaget Statens Skogsindustrier), a Swedish state-owned lumber products group. From 1942 until around 1999, ASSI operated various sawmills, paper mills, and wallboard factories across Sweden, exporting heavily to the United Kingdom throughout the 1950s and 1960s.⁴⁹ The boards used here are known as “smooth on one side”; a flat metal plate applied even heat and pressure to one side of the wet pulp, while the other side was pressed by a fine wire mesh, leaving a grid imprint. They were sold in large sheets that Eardley cut down as needed (fig. 27).⁵⁰

These boards are central characters in many of Eardley’s Catterline letters. Their tensile strength was critical in helping her battle punishing weather. Walker recalled watching her develop a painting for hours when suddenly “I saw the gale lift this great board right up, and fling it, face down of course, on the shingle. It had to be scraped and begun again”, or of another: “you can see the clamp marks where the gale has torn the board away, and all the corners bashed as Joan and I dragged and hauled it down then back up the ice-bound cliff in a real snorter of a gale”.⁵¹

Winter Sea III was similarly bashed, dragged, and hauled: a pair of circular indentations on the back match the shape of D-clamps seen in photographs of Eardley’s studio, and the sides of the board show cracks from applied pressure.⁵²

In general, Eardley’s boards speak to simple functionality over careful craftsmanship. The edges of Stacks at Evening and Autumn Sky, Catterline were left jagged and roughly cut.⁵³ Conservation reports for large works similar to Winter Sea III describe rough wooden supports found on the back of the boards, nailed into place from the front through the actual paint surface.⁵⁴ One early report details the removal of these nails and supports, adding: “painted on a completely unsuitable and ill-fashioned piece of sub-standard hardboard”.⁵⁵ While these industrial materials are clearly not of archival quality nor stable from a conservation perspective, it is worth considering what is lost from Eardley’s signature practice when these are quietly removed and replaced.

Ground layers

Eardley mentioned priming her own boards and canvases in batches with what she called “flat white”.⁵⁶ Conservation documents note the dry, gouache-like appearance of her white grounds, and Cordelia Oliver laments Eardley’s use, in the 1960s, of “a raised ground which has proved to be brittle”.⁵⁷ It seems safe to venture that Eardley’s grounds were sites of experimentation.

A painting’s ground (also known as gesso or primer) is a preparatory base applied directly to the raw substrate, making it firmer and less absorbent.⁵⁸ By design, grounds are usually unseen, yet they affect the appearance and application of all subsequent paint layers. In Eardley’s time, painters could purchase prepared grounds or create bespoke mixtures to maximize haptic, optic, and textural preferences. Throughout the 1950s, lead white—arguably the most common ground pigment for centuries—was steadily overtaken by the more chemically stable and nontoxic titanium white. This was paired with new acrylic resin binding media, rather than oils, marking a monumental transition for artists.⁵⁹ One conservator recently estimated that at least 90 percent of the post-1965 paintings she has examined had used an acrylic ground.⁶⁰ But because artists’ acrylics were largely unavailable in Britain until around 1963, it is unlikely that Eardley ever used them.⁶¹

Pigment analysis of the three works in this study revealed titanium white in many paint layers but not in the grounds.⁶² It is possible Eardley used different “flat whites” in each studio.⁶³ The thick, matte ground in Glasgow Close, accumulated in brittle globs on the painting’s edges, is composed primarily of calcium carbonate (chalk) with zinc oxide (figs. 28–32). The two Catterline paintings have razor-thin grounds that indicate barium sulfate (barite or blanc fixe) with zinc oxide, or lithopone white (figs. 33–38). Pigment particles from the grounds in Stacks at Evening and Glasgow Close are also visually distinct, with those from the former composed of more heterogeneous shapes and sizes. Binders could not be determined in the tested samples, as spectral analysis was obscured by the overwhelming presence of carbonates and sulfates.⁶⁴

Chalk and, to a lesser extent, barite or lithopone were common components of artists’ grounds, but they were also widely used in commercial paints.⁶⁵ One popular chalk-based interior house paint of the time, distemper, was sold as a liquid or as a dry powder to be mixed with warm water and glue.⁶⁶ Photos of Eardley’s Townhead studio show boxes of distemper powder on a shelf alongside various bottles and jars (figs. 39 and 40). The brand Coronette was distributed by Crown Colour Works, located just down the road from her studio. While this is not evidence that her chalk ground was distemper, it does merit attention, recalling that Eardley painted the walls of her first Townhead workspace with blue distemper, then used it as “a sort of luminous ground” in several drawings.⁶⁷ For artists, distemper was closely associated with tempera paint and valued for its color brilliance and rapid drying time; however, it was generally used on panels or other rigid supports. Its use as a canvas ground is less documented.⁶⁸

Boat paint

Boat paint is sometimes listed as part of Eardley’s experimental mixed media in Catterline.⁶⁹ She would have certainly had access to these paints there, as well as in Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Stonehaven—all places tied to maritime industries. And she presumably used them during her wartime work in a boatyard. But what exactly was “boat paint” as she knew it? The coatings used in small postwar fishing economies like Catterline’s are largely understudied.⁷⁰

Marine coatings varied widely depending on the type of vessel, its function, geography, and the preferences (even superstitions) of its owner. On any one vessel, different coatings were used on the wheelhouse and the outer hull, below and above the waterline. Below, antifouling or “bottom paint” often contained biocides such as red lead, copper, or mercury to prevent corrosion and organic growth underwater; above that, various combinations of durable gloss paint and varnish were used.⁷¹

Boatyard workers repainted fishing vessels annually, at the end of one season in preparation for the next. In Catterline, this likely centered around the crab or cod seasons.⁷² Competitive edge was critical: improved varnishes or resins protected the resilience of a vessel and its owner’s livelihood. Manufacturers issued promotional brochures with glossy samples, but actual recipes remained trade secrets. One manufacturer, Craig & Rose, based in Edinburgh, was known locally for durable paints—as used on the Forth Bridge—and countless varnish mixes for surfaces such as hulls, floors, and pews (fig. 41).⁷³ The industry behemoth, International Paint Company, specialized in marine coatings, which were manufactured in over twenty worldwide factories by 1953, including one in Glasgow. Their advertisements touted the benefits of their paints: increased fuel efficiency, faster vessel speeds, and lower annual painting costs (fig. 42).⁷⁴ Each season, supply shops or chandleries selected their stock according to the needs of local fisherfolk, who may have welcomed or mistrusted new technologies and were often motivated by family or community traditions, especially for aesthetics. Scottish fisheries on the east coast preferred a less glossy or varnished look compared to their rivals in the west, and newfangled hull colors like bright blue or green gained only selective acceptance beginning in the late 1950s.⁷⁵ Several of Eardley’s paintings after 1960 depict Catterline’s few boats on the shore: at least one was blue and one green.

At the time, industrial paint manufacture—of which marine coatings were a highly specialized subset—was transitioning from a craft-based process to a more scientific one, alongside developments in synthetic polymer resins. Compared to natural oils and resins, synthetics proved to be ideal standardizable binding media for high-intensity paints.⁷⁶ With local paint supplies moving quickly each season, and manufacturers vying for consumers’ trust, it seems improbable that even small markets like Catterline could opt out of these globally shifting technologies.

To establish a base point, the Scottish Fisheries Museum in Anstruther allowed me to take paint samples from two historic boats in their collection that likely retain midcentury paint: Lively Hope, with a blue underlayer (later painted over in green), and Gleanaway, with a tan-brown wheelhouse that has never been repainted. Focusing on binding media, all tested samples indicate a synthetic alkyd-based resin, with plasticizers included in the Gleanaway samples (figs. 43–45).⁷⁷ Alkyds are durable, oil-modified polyester resins that were developed at the turn of the twentieth century and refined over decades; they gained wide popularity after World War II, particularly in gloss house paint. Several midcentury artists are known to have painted with alkyds.⁷⁸ In tested samples of blue, brown, and white paints from Eardley’s works, however, alkyds could not be clearly identified (figs. 46–48). Oils and natural resin binders, such as copal or dammar, can be tentatively attributed, but the diverse mixed pigments and media in each sample obscured definitive spectral analysis.⁷⁹

This provides groundwork for deeper study. Eardley’s niece, Anne Morrison, suggests that, rather than mixing marine paint into her general palette, Eardley was more targeted: the blue and green boats in her later works (unavailable for this study) might have been painted with the boats’ actual coating.⁸⁰

Hand-ground pigments

Catterline photographs by Audrey Walker show Eardley leaning into a glass muller to spread a dark, chunky substance over a countertop (figs. 49 and 50).⁸¹ She appears to be grinding pigments—a traditional process, considering that prepared paint was widely available and easier to replenish on her fast-moving palette. Walker’s photos are a key record, as Eardley’s archived letters do not discuss this aspect of her practice.

Physical evidence in the paintings themselves is difficult to parse. Pigment particle size and uniformity can help distinguish between hand- and mechanically ground paints: by the 1950s, motor-powered roller mills produced finer, more homogeneous particles compared to hand-ground ones, which are larger and heterogeneous.⁸² In six Eardley paint samples, cut to cross-sectional view to reveal paint stratigraphy, each color layer appears relatively homogeneous. Most particles measure 5 microns (0.005 mm) or less. The ground in Stacks at Evening is an outlier, containing irregular grains measuring up to 50 microns each (0.05 mm) (see figs. 33 and 34).⁸³ However, mixing and grinding paint is a labyrinthine process with numerous variables—there is no standard particle size for all colors. Whether ground by hand or by machine, this metric differs from pigment to pigment, and from manufacturer to manufacturer.⁸⁴ The paintings in this study include many standard pigments in various states of admixture. A preliminary list includes cadmium reds and yellows; vermilion (mercury sulfide) red; iron-oxide ochres; arsenic and chrome greens; cerulean (cobalt stannate) and Prussian blues; carbon black; and various whites including barite, titanium, zinc, and lead whites. Determining if any of these colors were hand-ground requires analysis outside the scope of this article.⁸⁵

Nonetheless, the photographs provoke useful questions and considerations. Nearly every Joan Eardley biography uses these images. One affirms her “bright colours were ground and mixed in the cottage and once out of doors they were applied quickly with a palette knife, house painter’s brushes … smaller brushes and rags”.⁸⁶ A 1963 news article about Eardley stated that she “spends much of her time making her own paints” during winter, when there is less sunlight for outdoor painting.⁸⁷ Yet one of the archived photos is physically annotated “Catterline—Summer 1961”.⁸⁸ Was it a seasonal task or more routine? Making paint by hand is incredibly slow labor, yielding small quantities. This seems impractical for Eardley’s large boards and her penchant for documenting unpredictable weather (with unpredictable colors). In the photos, the amount of paint she prepares is slight.

Recent scholarship has proposed that Eardley was making “runny” paint to drip and splash, connecting hand-ground pigments to increased liquidity.⁸⁹ However, prepared paints are commonly adjusted with liquid dilutants such as turpentine to achieve a looser consistency, and the method of hand-grinding specifically does not benefit from floods of oil. Rather, controlled amounts are slowly added to the dry pigment powder as the mixture is evenly pressed and smeared into a smooth paste with soft peaks. One ubiquitous painting manual of the time, The Materials of the Artist by Max Doerner, warns that hand-ground paints should “not run like house painters’ paint”; he explicitly encouraged this method because factory-made artists’ paints were too oily and lacked body, having gone “through the rollers much too often”.⁹⁰

Midcentury British painters kept their finger on the pulse of developments in paint manufacture. They read news of their US counterparts who tested and advised on early iterations of artists’ acrylics.⁹¹ But, while this era tends to be framed in terms of its novel formulations, painters were hungry to manipulate mixtures of all kinds—new, old, viscous, liquid. Surface experimentation itself was the draw.⁹² Hand-grinding paint might have been old-fashioned, but it was also entirely contemporary.

At the time, a growing number of mass-produced publications enabled painters to harness the technical aspects of their craft. Material-focused columns in art journals and magazines, or popular books such as Doerner’s, took a scientific, instructional approach to historical recipes and contemporary practices alike. Many authors were themselves artists.⁹³ Others, like Rutherford Gettens and George Stout, worked in the field of conservation–restoration, which was becoming a data-driven laboratory science, propelled by material analysis instruments honed for industrial and military research. Their 1942 manual, Painting Materials: A Short Encyclopaedia, detailed the physical and chemical properties of pigments, binders, and other media. In the preface to the 1966 revised edition, the authors expressed surprise and gratitude that so many painters (as opposed to museum professionals) had embraced the book.⁹⁴

Eardley was an avid reader with a robust studio library that was not systematically catalogued after her death. Of the books kept by her family, none are technical manuals. Those that remain indicate a broad range of painterly interests, from historic mural (tempera) techniques to a 1957 copy of New Art in America, which discussed twentieth-century painters in essays laden with materiality.⁹⁵ She also greatly admired Vincent Van Gogh and likely studied his methods: a major English-language translation of his letters, published in 1958, revealed his own attention to coarsely ground pigments.⁹⁶

By hand-grinding paint, Eardley might have sought to control optical characteristics such as opacity or luminosity. The granular structure of each pigment can impact color brilliance: smaller, machine-ground particles reflect or scatter more light, causing some colors to appear less saturated.⁹⁷ Powdered pigments were more cost-effective than tubes or tins, so perhaps she stretched resources for premium colors this way, saving them for selective passages or specific hues. But the assumption that she was making oil paint in the photographs also overlooks other possibilities. Tempera or pastels could both be made by hand from pigment powder. Pastels, in particular, were a staple in Eardley’s robust drawing practice, and some midcentury artists did use them in paintings.⁹⁸

The exact material she concocts in Audrey Walker’s photographs is enigmatic, but the labor itself is revealing. Painting is, above all, a process of haptic research. Properties such as texture, hue intensity, and drying time—all determined by the complex chemistry between pigments, binders, and other additives—are the very nexus of a painter’s language. Eardley’s letters overflow with technicolor descriptions of how she saw the world, and she was nothing if not obsessed with her daily craft. That these photos were taken only in one studio late in her career should not limit their potential interpretations. Eardley probably tinkered with many variations of paint, not only in Catterline but also in Glasgow.

Eardley’s mark-making and paint texture took many forms. In Townhead and Catterline, photos show an arsenal of brushes in all sizes and bristle shapes and various palette knives close at hand to help her think through and load colors rapidly. In a video filmed at her Townhead studio in the early 1960s, she paints with quick and decisive strokes, gripping brushes or knives in a tight fist (fig. 51). Layers of paint from previous sessions had been left to dry and harden before she added new passages and scraped down into others, as if excavating the surface.⁹⁹ None of the three works in this study were painted on top of a preparatory charcoal underdrawing; instead, Eardley drew with paint.¹⁰⁰ She accomplished this in different ways. Variations in the weight, speed, and layering of her line work are distinct in each painting.

In Glasgow Close, Eardley’s media is heavy. Above the white ground is a thin red wash, likely a base tone, but this is smothered by four or five thick paint layers. Bits of unidentified particles are suspended in brushstrokes, adding a plaster-like texture to the generally matte surface. Areas of intentional scumbling and scraping, and less intentional cracking paint from the dense impasto, reveal several subsurface color layers. This is most readily seen in the doorway, the window, and the three figures. Eardley would have left this painting to dry at various stages to accomplish the effect of thick buildup and lateral scraping down, as in the video. She left no breathing room for thin washes or visible canvas weave (figs. 52–55).

By contrast, the two Catterline works display more of a sweeping gestural stride, with wet-on-wet painting and selective impasto. They are not scumbled and scraped. Both Stacks at Evening and Winter Sea III are built up as a crescendo from the edges to the center of each painting. The outer margins of the compositions are a semitransparent grey-brown wash that barely conceals the ripples of wide brushstrokes below it, made from the application of white grounds. From there, the paint is worked to a thick impasto toward the center. The level of sheen varies from color to color, with some of the dark grey, black, or turquoise hues appearing glossier than others.¹⁰¹ In Stacks at Evening, only a few decisive brushstrokes establish the pink-yellow dusk Eardley had observed (figs. 56–58).

More complex gobs of paint churn across Winter Sea III, with some passages appearing marbled from brushes loaded with multiple colors at once (figs. 59–61). Eardley is reported to have used crumpled newspaper for raised effects, which may explain one particularly sculptural knot of glossy, black-brown paint near the center of Winter Sea III (fig. 62).¹⁰²

Given these distinct approaches, time seems to be a critical factor in how Eardley selected and applied materials. Oil paints are slow-drying media, so working on multiple paintings simultaneously helped maintain momentum. In Townhead, on her solid easel indoors, she allowed surfaces to dry and harden for later reworking. On the coast, with her folding easel, she worried more about shifting seasons, weather patterns, tides, and the limits of her own body: “Yesterday I was near dead at the end of the day, working at top speed—today I will take it easier as I realize it will continue”.¹⁰³ As part of my research, I visited Catterline to sketch in blustery autumn and found my hand stiffening from the cold after drawing outdoors for a mere half hour. My line work became fast and rigid.¹⁰⁴ Eardley’s tenacity was obviously more well honed, but so was her haptic knowledge—her command of speed, temperature, and dexterity. In Catterline, she seemed to use brushes and paint as if they were drawing materials, like pastels, with a faster hand–eye connection and no time to wait. Light quality is closely related: Eardley did not have electric lighting in either studio, so she worked in the daytime. Slow, rolling shifts in the intensity and color of light in smog-afflicted Townhead, or the volatile seasonal clouds of Catterline, influenced her color choices. Summer in Catterline was perhaps the exception, when daylight lingered. Working on a series of cornfields, she observed: “my palette has changed almost imperceptibly from greens to yellows to orange. So I reckon the ripening process has shifted more than I am really aware of”.¹⁰⁵

The present study does not include Eardley’s summer paintings, but comparing her work from both studios by season may elicit connections or patterns of surface quality and drying time. Seasonal markers have served as reference points for dating and naming her work, for example Winter Sea III, but they could also define her paint handling. And, while the nuances of light as she experienced them are impossible to recreate, it is important to bear this in mind when we view her paintings today in a gallery or conservation lab, under uniform and neutral lighting in seasonless spaces.¹⁰⁶

When I began this research, I sought proof of Joan Eardley as a catalyst for technical innovation, a painter who used nontraditional materials such as boat paint or beach sand in new and novel ways. This is a common framework of art history, a metric of value that distinguishes individual artists from their peers. Instead, I found evidence of someone who blurred traditional and contemporary technologies and who was inextricable from her peers—not only artists but also joiners, builders, fisherfolk, family, neighbors, and their children. The Eardley who emerges in this study is one who fluctuates. She moved frequently between her urban and rural studios—each structure was at once indoors and outdoors, humid and dry in turns. She painted with both old techniques and ones she developed on the fly. She sometimes used supplies with great care and attention, sometimes not. Her paintings are a textured tangle of foraged and intentional gestures; her studios were sites of trial and error, give and take, patience and speed. All this fed Eardley’s cyclical process.

Dredging the untidiness of painting, experimentation, and material change at midcentury, this study has begun to record a more subtle understanding of Eardley’s workspaces and the tools and technologies that shaped her visual language. While most exhibitions, articles, and reviews have divided Eardley’s Glasgow and Catterline, here her places are both distinct and reciprocal: she developed communities and practices unique to each location, yet her supplies also traveled between them, blurring their boundaries.¹⁰⁷ The lesser-studied hubs of Aberdeen and Stonehaven exercised a quiet connective sway that merits further study. And many more questions remain. Just as these three works cannot be seen as representing her entire prolific output, the scientific analysis used here reveals only a microscopic fraction of each dynamic painted surface (figs. 63–65). The complexities and unknowns of Eardley’s practice demand richer comparative data. Understanding her potentially unstable ground layers and mixed binding media will impact the ongoing stewardship and preservation of her work, while acknowledging that she reused supports and weather-embattled boards adds historical and environmental context to her practice. Each vignette above proposes avenues for further research.

Beyond simply recording, this study is also a form of preservation. After she died, Eardley’s chaotic, dynamic studios were not meticulously preserved as sites of cultural significance, as were those of some of her peers.¹⁰⁸ The Scottish painter John Lowrie Morrison, who studied in Glasgow in the late 1960s, recalled, “I found her studio in Townhead when they were pulling the tenements down. The door wasn’t locked and there were drawings on the floor. I was going to take them away, but I was too honest. When I went back, the building was rubble”.¹⁰⁹ Documentation of Eardley’s daily practice is scattered across the letters, photos, and memories that were held by her close cocoon of friends and family—nearly all of them women, many of whom were artists, and some of whom, like Eardley herself, identified as lesbian. Most of their documents and accounts have been archived; some letters were embargoed until the 2010s and some remain private.

Embedded in Joan Eardley’s paintings are memories of when, where, and how they were crafted (fig. 66). The work of illuminating them—and her—is ongoing.