A Homage to Joan Eardley (1922 - 1963)
This image of Catterline could almost tell the whole story of this place in relation to the painter Joan Eardley … but not quite. It shows many of the various locations around the village and the surrounding countryside that she painted and illustrates a way of life, now lost, centred around salmon fishing. The view is from No.1 Catterline (South Row) where Joan Eardley lived and/or worked for much of her time here, renting it from 1954, converting it into a studio in 1960 and finally buying it in 1963. Joan took many monochrome photographs and a similar photograph of hers from this spot shows the layout of the small fishing village which has barely changed during the 70 intervening years. The cottages still stretch along the top of the low cliffs with the agricultural land behind. The “Watchie” can still be seen (last building on the cliff to the right) which took its name from the old Customs and Excise house from which Officers kept watch for smugglers and where Joan stayed on her earliest visits. Then there’s the sweep of the bay below from the harbour and pier, round the shore to the boat house, the old salmon bothy and Makin Green where the salmon fishing nets were hung out over poles to dry.
The old salmon bothy
I have always admired Joan Eardley’s famous paintings (and less well known photographs) of life and the children in the Townhead area of Glasgow, but I only became aware of her connection with Catterline after reading the book “Joan Eardley: A Sense of Place” (published by the National Galleries of Scotland to accompany an exhibition of her work in Edinburgh in 2016/2017). I love her abstract portraits of children and the streets in Glasgow, painted in her signature colour palette of rich oranges, greens and dark blues, which she brought with her to Catterline.
Despite the obvious urban/rural contrast Joan found a similar sense of community in both places and yet she chose not to paint the people of Catterline. In her early visits, Joan seemed most interested in painting the village and surrounding rural landscape. Her paintings are particularly striking in the details that emerge from her abstract way of working, with the obvious elements of the scenes such as the cottages, streets or beehives disappearing behind colourful foreground vegetation or merging into a background of heavy skies or blanket snow. In my photographs I tried to emulate her emphasis on the colourful foreground detail. Later she turned to the sea, painting along the shore from Makin Green and later still, now suffering problems with her sight, she painted large, increasingly abstract seascapes with dark stormy skies.
“Kale Tap” and South Row from Makin Green
South to Todd Head lighthouse
In 2023 I had the chance to visit Catterline myself and was treated to a sunny day in which the autumn colours seemed to echo those in Joan’s paintings. For me it was the views from below that drew me in; I wanted to explore the extraordinary cliffs with their flora, the shoreline with its unusual geology and the intersections of village, land and sea. The low, friable cliffs are made of an extraordinary rock known as conglomerate, over which vegetation spreads easily and the wild flowers bloom profusely. The cliffs are eroded by the sea leaving amazingly shaped structures on the shore, some earning interesting local names. The large flat-topped rock formation painted by Joan Eardley is called the Kale Tap by the villagers who used to grow kale on its top. Other formations went by nicknames such as the “Dunnie Woof” (as it looked like a dog but didn’t bark!).
The salmon bothy
The “Watchie” above the salmon bothy
Makin Green
A closer look at the Catterline conglomerate reveals larger rounded rocks of variable origin, colour and size, from small pebbles to impressive boulders, embedded in a fine-grained “cement” (man-made concrete is itself a conglomerate) which is readily eroded by the sea. Higher up the shore, stones fall out of the mix as the matrix is eroded by wind and rain, leaving their concave impressions exposed to the air and lichen growth. The result is a colourful display of nature’s art and abstract design.
Joan Eardley spent most of the last 13 years of her life visiting or living in Catterline. She became increasingly unwell in May1963 and was diagnosed with breast cancer which had spread and was the cause of her deteriorating sight. She was transferred from hospital in Aberdeen to Killearn Hospital, (north of Glasgow) where she died in August 1963. Her ashes were scattered on Makin Green on the shore of her beloved Catterline
Coincidently, Killearn Hospital, which was built to take sick and injured servicemen during WW2, thereafter at different times housed various NHS units for TB, ‘fevers’ and specialties (orthopaedics, neurosurgery, cancer) before closing in 1972. It has stood derelict for all the 25 years that I have lived nearby until the current redevelopment of the site for housing.