Antonia Quirk

Welcome to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service, the program that investigates the creative process. I'm Antonia Quirk, and this edition is unusual in that its subject has been dead some 60 years. They don't take much encouraging to come up and be painted. They don't pose. They usually come up and say, will you paint me?

From the 1940s to the early 1960s, the Scottish artist Joan Eardley painted portraits of children and wild land and seascapes. These nature paintings were intensely created, mostly outdoors in all weathers. Joan applied oil paint with tremendous vigor and dynamism, often leaving bits of sand or plants embedded in the canvas.

Nämä tehtävät ovat isoja ja täydellisiä dramaa. Eerdli ei ollut yksinkertainen taiteilija. Sinä aina tiedät, mitä katsot, kun näet hänen työniäsi. Se on selkeästi kaupungin ilma tai ilmainen maa. Mutta hänen taiteilijat voivat näyttää melkein yksinkertaisiksi, koska ne ovat niin laajattuja ja skulptiivisia. Prolifioitunut, koulutettava ja globaalin suhteiden yliopistossa, Joan syö breast cancerin 1963. Hän oli vain 42-vuotias.

A new exhibition, Joan Eardley, The Nature of Painting, has opened at the National Galleries of Scotland in the capital city of Edinburgh. Eardleys work has been shown here before, but for the first time it's been placed next to some of the landmark paintings in the gallery's extensive collection.

I joined the exhibition's curator, Kerry Gledhill, as she brings Joan Eardley's life and work to the walls of the gallery, finding connections in her working practice, preoccupations and spirit, with artists such as Claude Monet, foundational member of the Impressionist movement, who worked in France from the 1850s to the 1920s, painting poppies, gardens, haystacks, water lilies and beaches, rippling with light-filled greens and yellows.

It's an exhibition that stands as a profound declaration of confidence in an artist who has always been appreciated in Scotland, but whose name ought to be known worldwide as one of the most important female artists of the 20th century. Joan Eardley, this exhibition shouts, is one of the greats.

It's January 2026 and I am in Edinburgh, just outside the National Galleries of Scotland Modern II building, which is the home of modern and surrealist art. It is a bleak, stark, wintry day. Everything, the trees, the sky, feels quiet and shattered and waiting the winter out.

Tämän asunnon sisällä Kerri on hyvin työskennellyt. Hän on valmistellut muun muassa asioiden pisteitä. Mennään vain yrittämään löytää hänet. Kerri, hei! Hei! Hyvää tapahtumaa! Hyvää tapahtumaa! Hei!

So we've come into modern two, and we're in the spaces where the work's going to be shown. Describe the color that you've painted the walls.

Täällä on kirjoituksia ja kuvia vanhoista ruinoista. Joona oli monia erilaisia influensseja, kuten kun hän oli taustapuolinen taustakoulussa Glasgowissa, Suomessa suurimmassa kaupungissa. Silloin, kun hän oli 30-vuotias ja loppui elämään, hän eläi suurin pihastusvillan Katalynissa Suomessa.

Here she would stand for weeks down by the shore while the rain turned to sun and then rain again. In Scotland the weather is almost always against you. Well, I very often find I will take my paints to a certain place which has moved me and I begin to paint there and

You're listening to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service. I'm Antonia Quirk and I'm following gallery curator Kerry Gledhill as she opens a new exhibition of the work of pivotal Scottish artist Joan Eardley.

I'm on a little train traveling from the west coast of Scotland, where I live, east to Edinburgh and the gallery, where Kerry is deep into the installation of the exhibition now. The rest of the UK is firmly into spring, but up here...

There's lots of snow on the hills still, but daffodils and primrose and catkins and then great waves of hailstones moving across the lochs and the forests. It's really visceral and verdant, and it's very, very Joan Eardley-like.

I'm going to be looking at some of her large landscape paintings today. These are scenes of snow and then tangles of flowers and fields and crops and earth, mud, roots, all done in thick oil paint.

I'm also going to watch a painting of Claude Monet's being unwrapped and hung in that same room. So it's a really exciting day, but a long and cold highland journey to get there.

When I get to the gallery, Kerry is overseeing the hanging of Jones' large landscape paintings in the room with terracotta walls. We stand in front of Catiline in Winter from 1963. It's really moving to see it in person. It emanates a powerful, pewter kind of light. There's a little row of cottages, a country lane covered in snow and a low-hanging moon.

Jones-painetta Seeded Grasses and Daisies, september from 1960, is hanging in here too. It's painted as though we're right down, almost in the soil. It's so encrusted with stalks and flower heads. It looks like the fossilized remains of an exquisite animal.

There's also a startling 1944 painting called Landscape of the Vernal Equinox nearby. It's by the British artist Paul Nash. He was a photographer, an illustrator and a surrealist artist with a great love of certain hills in the southeast of England. In this painting, a sun and moon hang simultaneously in the sky above the site of an Iron Age hill fort. And there's one more masterpiece left to hang.

Onko se moneen ylöspäin? Niin. Laitan sen paikalle, josta se menee. Laitan sen ylöspäin, josta se menee. Se on melko kiva paper-tappu. Tämä on todella hyvä. Tämä on pohjoismuotoisuus. Olemme hyvin harjoitteluneet kollegat, jotka tekevät näitä asioita. Minun pitää mennä moneen ylöspäin. Olen nauttunut, kun teet sen ympärillä.