Download a PDF of the exhibition catalogue - The Scottish Gallery

This stunning painting is one of the artist’s most ambitious and successful works on paper. It is
painted on good quality watercolour paper which has been laid onto mounting board so that a strip
along the bottom, painted a warm blue and bearing the signature, adds visual relief to the richly
worked subject. Two groups of children, those on the right much more defined, stand in front of a
tenement window, emanating a blue light; there is a pause in a game, a skipping rope is slack between
the groups. To the right by a dark window a simple graffito of a child skipping is chalked on the wall.
The need to draw what was relevant and true in 1960s Glasgow was important for Joan, as it was for
the cave painters of Lascaux in pre-history, where she visited in 1951.
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