Joan Eardley 1921-1963

Three Children at a Tenement Window, 1961

Children at the Window

Three Children at a Tenement Window, 1961

Children at the Window

 

Glasgow Kids, A Saturday Matinee Picture Queue

Joan Eardley was born in May 18 1921 in Sussex. Eardley travelled extensively, basing her paintings on locations such as Italy, France and Catterline (N.E. Scotlland). A series of her paintings were also based around Glasgow tenements where she studied the lives of different children who lived in very poor conditions.

When drawing children she was influenced by Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso, and also, in America, by Ben Shahn whose drawings of urban children have a direct manner and socially engaged edge.

Joan Eardley's also painted a series of long, rectangular panels of children playing in the streets of boarded up shops and bomb damage using photos that she had taken.

Eardley is a good artist to use in this exhibition because her series of paintings from the Glasgow tenements depict the children struggling to get by in day to day life. I used the dungeons of the castle to display some of Eardley's work, because, for example, the painting 'Glasgow Kids, A Saturday Matinee Picture Queue' interprets the overcrowdedness in this city, similar to the hundreds of men who were once crammed into the dungeons of the castle hundreds of years ago.