Joan Eardley
Joan Eardley painted on hardboard facing the sea
a matter of steps from her stone cottage.
A smudgy sun in a leaden sky hanging lost
above snow-filled streets, other times
a swathe of yellow and orange for a stubble-field.
Mood and feel of a scene, scratching and scoring
mixing flower seeds and gravel as medium.
She was moving toward abstraction with
a house paint brush at the end of her hand
her arm arcing and sweeping across the board
catching the energy between paint and thought
the board cut down into a square so that
what she saw, she painted – waves rising and flattening
beneath her, the North Sea churning its grey
stony presence. Storms and light, great blocks
of darkness above and beneath scraps of white.
Sometimes she finished three paintings in a day.
She wore men’s clothes, rode a scooter,
spent many nights alone writing letters, grinding pigments
living for an art that might save others.
These days I need something to bang my head against
some boundary, wall or level of self-doubt.
Instead of hardboard, I rewrite A4 Spirax pages
working the gap between first thought and draft.
It is said Eardley anchored her easels to the ground
with stones and pipes. Squally gusts could fling
a canvas one hundred metres.
Paints and palette knife at her feet
she seemed happiest watching the gap
between hardboard and sea. An outsider
who scraped at what the wind allowed
living alone in a stone cottage at Catterline.
She painted until she could not see.
At forty-two, she was dead from breast cancer, 1963
the year I was born, it seems pointless and necessary
to cross out and fling words for Joan Eardley.
(Joan Eardley https://joaneardley.com )
Weather
My parent’s bedroom was off-limits.
A room darkened for a child sleeping
in a bassinette beside their bed.
Sometimes I stood in their doorway
weighted by questions. A framed image
of Mary pointing to her Immaculate heart
musty smells of the dressing table –
face powders, lipsticks, necklaces,
coins and tissues. Dusty surfaces
I was drawn to, if only to understand
my mother, listen to the murmuring
voice of my father.
When a baby woke, my brothers and sisters
raced to smell the baby skin, carry
the baby down to the kitchen for a bottle
of warm powdered milk. Such smells
of intimacy and daily mess held out
against the clatter of rain on our tin roof.
A thrumming so hard we had to raise our voices
or wait for a lull. One night the rain
came in waves, a damp stain
above my parents’ bed began to weep.
My father leapt out of bed clad only
in a white singlet and underpants
ran outside to fetch a ladder with
the starless night rushing about him.
Hail stones had piled up between the gables.
Water had banked until its weight
was released through their softened ceiling
cascading onto their bed, yet
their dressing table remained untouched –
a musty record of my mother hovering
before a mirror with a hair brush.