Kweiseye is an art criticism blog written by Tom Kwei. If you enjoy this article, browse the archive here for more than 60 other critiques of both artists and exhibitions. Any questions/queries/use: tomkweipoet@gmail.com.
Some of my all time favourite songs are instrumental. Freed from the conventional storytelling of lyrics, there often paradoxically seems to be more to be said through a weaving melody line than couplets that inevitably chorus climb. Of course there isn’t any actual tale being spun within a song of this ilk like, say, Dirty Three’s excellent ‘The Restless Waves’, rather it seems the lack of a coherent centre allows the technique and style of the musicians to flourish.
As Tommy Emmanuel and Guthrie Govan before her then, Joan Eardley feels to me as an instrumentalist. An artist who primarily feels concerned with pageantry, her affecting style taking over her stark depictions. Eardley’s world is one of great force and abandon, a place dominated by the brush rather than any message.
July Fields (1959)
This painting captivates through its impenetrable surface. With little in the way of pictorial representation July Fields feels essentially an exhibition for Eardley’s sublime control of chaotic colour blending. Such simplicity of image – the gruff of a field beneath a smudged blue sky – inevitably invites scrutiny, and up close the complex grassland begins to disintegrate to something more akin to the tapering plaster of a wall than a waist high meadow.
Its blends come in pockmarked creases, the brushstrokes visible as they mingle. Every inch of the greenery feels worthy of interest as its subtle tones weave in and out, leading the audience’s eye with them. The grass here is dense and stubborn rather than flowing, almost concrete in its recalcitrance. It seems that no matter how hard you scour, it’s impossible to get past the first layer. And it is here within this investigation that the true wonder of ‘July Fields’ is revealed, with two distinct halves emerge from the pasture.
As Manet famously said, ‘there are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against each other’, and here within July Fields we see a perfect demonstration of this collision. At the far right there being a more typical depiction, the greens deep and verdant, their flowers evoked as white wisps of flick on a leaning stem. Whilst at the left there holds a splodge of red on top of the brush, the sun perhaps, that seems to have dribbled down into the reeds as water.
Perhaps the impervious nature of July Fields works in its favour, as down here, as nature towers above, we feel relaxed, guarded. Free from the heat of July and able to singularly appreciate the sense of isolation that Eardley stubbled technique conjures.
Sea and Snow (1958)
Caught amidst two marauding elements, the smiling inward curve of a shore appears battered between. Eardley’s painting is truly remarkable here, capable both of evoking the slushy drifts of snow on the sea, as well as the blistered browning rocks before the tide.
The foreshortened sky and indulgent coast pulls the image closer to us as viewers, giving a reduced distance to everything. Detail is sparse. And within the broad, gnarled strokes of the sky and the near translucent bluffs at the bottom right, Eardley presents a vague, cold world. A place in which the sea and the snow work to drain each other of definition, their interactions, such as the long streaks of turbulent white against the furthest point of the cliffs, marvels of layered discipline.
Similar to the earlier explored Raoul Dufy, Eardley seems to revel in the artifice of her work. There is no effort towards true mimicry (what are those pink streaks on the water for one?) rather an indulgence in the raw revelry of display.
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