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A Field by the Sea - Summer

Artist: Eardley, Joan Kathleen Harding, RSA · 1921-1963

painted in the clifftop cornfields at Catterline. Cordelia Oliver in her 1988 monograph (Mainstream) writes (p.76); "No.18 with its spare room and mod cons was her hom efrom then on, but her affection for No.1 remained, and she kept it as her studio and store, for behind it lay those fields of oats and barley, humming with insects above the wild flowers and grasses in summer, and in wintewr, bleak with snow and ice on the stubble. 'I've got a serie sof paintings going at the end of my old cottage', Joan wrote to Margot [Sandeman] in 1962. 'I never seem to find that I want to move. It's a handy spot as no-one comes near and I can work away undisturbed. I just go from one painting to another - just the grasses and the corn - it's oats this year, barley it wa slast year. There's a wee, windblown tree, and that's all. But every day and every week it looks a bit different - the flowers come and the corn grows so it seems silly to shift about.I just leave my painting table out here, and my easel and palette.'"



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