Download a PDF of the exhibition catalogue - The Scottish Gallery

Joan was introduced to Port Glasgow by Dorothy Steel, who had a studio
there, in 1950 and she spent much time there drawing. A few years later she
completed an ambitious picture, Children, Port Glasgow, exhibited at The
Scottish Gallery in a group show for the International Festival; Six Young
Scottish Painters in 1955 which makes a subject picture out of the same cast
of kids more stylistically treated in Shipbuilder’s Street.
5 Shipbuilder’s Street, c.1951
oil on canvas, 94 x 34.25 cms
signed lower right
illustrated
Joan Eardley, RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream Publishing
Company (Edinburgh) Ltd, 1988, p40
“The technique in which squarish slabs of pigment could be articulated
and given form by forceful dark lines was developed in paintings like
Shipbuilder’s Street (c.1951), a tall, narrow canvas of street kids playing
against a background of shipbuilding activity. Patches of rust-red
stabbed by brighter scarlet, yellow and cerulean blue stand for the
children playing on the pavement, with a pale grey hull, high on the
stocks behind them, against a dun-coloured sky.”
Joan Eardley, RSA by Cordelia Oliver, Mainstream Publishing
Company (Edinburgh) Ltd, 1988, p39
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