Friday on my mind . . .

Not another Robinson Crusoe joke, I've got The Easybeats song earworming me. More likely the it's classy cover by London (circa '77). And it is Friday. Not quite the same when you're working for yourself.

​Apart from  lunchtime drinking spo-dee-o-dee.

​I'm sure there has been extremely mild to non-existent despair that this blog has remained up on bricks as it were, for the past two weeks. 
My exhibition LOOKING AT YOU will run from Thursday 16th to Thursday 30th March. The Private View will be on Thursday 16th between 6-9pm.
I will post full details next week. It will be also listed as an Event on my sparkly new Facebook page. Invites will be sent out. Trumpets will be blown! The 21 paintings on display will come from the past 6 months’ work and are showcased on this website. 

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Intended blogging has been hampered due to unforeseen circumstances that did in a positive include a trip to Scotland. In February. Where the sea in Ayrshire gets up and walks heavily across the land. In between downpours I did manage to get to Edinburgh to see the Joan Eardley exhibition.
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https://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/on-now-coming-soon/joan-eardley

I think that anyone who has grown up I Scotland and is familiar with the arts will know of Eardley’s paintings. Born in Sussex in 1921, went to Glasgow Art school in 1940 and thereafter her work and life remained anchored in Scotland. Albeit two very different Scotlands.
Firstly, the children of the Glasgow’s east end tenements against graffiti scored walls, expressive and energetically painted in thick layers of impasto and collage. Very much the art of the street. Where she drew them, photographed them and cajoled them into her nearby studio to sit for her. Wonderful use of colour, vivid splashes of red in their cardigans, orange in their hair and deep blue against the murk of brickwork, doorways and window frames.

Secondly, the Sea and Landscapes of Catterline, a small remote village on the north-east coast. She worked out of a small cottage, taking her large boards, oil paints and easel down to the shore front, harnessing it with ropes to the ground against the wild winds. Again, the painting is bold and expressive, sweeps of colour representing the waves crashing and the clouds billowing. The rows of small cottages in all seasons, dark and foreboding in winter, bright and inviting in summer.

​I first came across her work when I went Glasgow Art School from school. She has remained a great inspiration over the years and to see so much of her work – particularly through the context of the exhibition – focusing on these dual themes, was a great experience. She was a respected and successful painter that could have gone on to be one of Britain’s greatest contemporary artists but she died in 1963 from cancer, aged 42.