Kate Downie: Conversations with Joan

By Susan Mansfield, 27.11.2024

Kate Downie, Four Children, 1962-2022 (after Joan Eardley). Image courtesy of Glasgow Women's Library

When Joan Eardley died in 1963, at the age of just 42, a painting was left unfinished on the easel of her Townhead studio. Known as ‘Two Children’, it was purchased for Glasgow Museums after a public appeal in 1994, a poignant tribute to the artist whom the city had taken to its heart.

Amid the celebrations of Eardley’s centenary in 2021, Glasgow Museums invited leading Scottish painter Kate Downie to create a new finished version. It was the beginning of a painterly “conversation with Joan” across six decades, a journey which would take Downie deep into Eardley’s story and uncover insights about the painting which no one could have guessed.

“It was a bit like someone trying to finish Mahler’s Tenth Symphony,” Downie says, speaking about the project at her Fife studio. “Mahler’s Symphony was never finished in the way Mahler would have done it. But it’s that kind of continuum, bringing it on into the future, taking it forward, while respecting her practice.”

Downie’s painting is now on show, along with the drawings and studies she produced while working on it, in Conversations with Joan at Glasgow Women’s Library. The show also includes an original Eardley painting loaned by the artist’s family and a second, large-scale, Downie work, made in collaboration with the children who were her models.

When Downie first approached Glasgow Museums, it was with an idea for a group exhibition in which as many as 20 Scottish figurative painters would “complete” versions of the unfinished painting in their own styles. “I think I was a little bit fed up of the way that Eardley’s work was always shoved off into the past, the sense of her being cut off in her prime. It’s always felt like a tragedy to me, but it almost became the thing that everyone remembered about her, rather than what she was doing.

“There was this idea of finishing it for her, stepping in and saying, ‘We’ll help you Joan, we’ll keep your memory alive and we’ll enable you to be part of the 21st century’. I had this great vision of 20 different canvases all finished differently.”

When no budget could be found for that project, Downie was invited to complete the painting herself. She says she “loved Eardley’s work from the get-go” after seeing it while she was a student at Gray’s School of Art. In the 1990s, she undertook a residency at the Rottenrow Maternity Hospital in Townhead, and she spent time painting in Catterline during her Coast Road Diaries project in 2007-8.

Now, she returned to her studio with a giclée print of ‘Two Children’ on canvas, x-rays of the painting and conservators’ notes. “I had to circle the project. I was quite nervous about working directly on to the print. I started drawing on top of it, then immediately realised I was ruining my primary source. I decided I had to start at the beginning and make my own one-to-one version. I had to learn her brushstrokes. I primed my piece of linen the way Joan would have and used as many vintage art materials as I could.”

Doing what she describes as “art history from the inside”, she began to learn not only how Eardley painted but the story of this particular painting and why it was left unfinished. “I think it became physically too much for her. She had got very ambitious with the scale of her work, particularly because she had gone really big with her Catterline paintings.”

“I think she started this painting a good year before she died, but her energies fell off. The two faces were quite intensely worked, and the graffiti and stencilled lettering behind them, but the lower part of the painting was really sketchy, I think because she found bending and sitting and moving this heavy canvas on stretchers really difficult.”

“I could tell she had a rapport with the children. She often sat on a stool when she drew little ones, I could see she didn’t ever tower over them or look down on them, that’s something I hadn’t appreciated before.” Downie realised early on, that, like Joan, she needed some young models, and soon her studio was busy with friends, neighbours and young families who responded to a call on a local Faceboook group. They also brought insights into the painting.”

“Sarah, who’s a mother of two, looked at the arm that was in front of the girl’s face and said, ‘That’s not the girl’s arm, that’s a baby’. Then I started drawing into the painting and the baby emerged - so it wasn’t two children, it was three. Then I became aware of a toddler-shaped gap at the bottom left. You can only go where you think Joan’s intentions were, and it’s important that you have to own your own thread of inquiry, but I did really think there was a toddler holding on to the girl’s skirt.”

Much later, when the painting was finished and had been bought by Glasgow Museums, she met Ann Samson - one of the models for the painting with her sister Pat - who confirmed the story: “Auntie Joan” had taken the girls and their two baby brothers to make sketches in front of the red doors of the scrapyard near her studio. Ann remembered chasing after her toddler brother George when he ran away from the group.
As the new painting - now ‘Four Children’ - took shape, Downie realised she wanted to make another work in a more contemporary style. ‘Dead or Alive’ is a much larger unframed painting which incorporates drawings done by the 11 children who visited the studio. Sharks, dinosaurs and the tracks of a toy tractor weave through Downie’s own marks on a background of Eardley-esque vibrant red.

“It’s quite a tricky thing to embed yourself so deeply inside being somebody else. I think if I had been less sure of who I am as an artist, it would have been more difficult. You have to subsume your own creative personality. ‘Dead or Alive’ was really important because it was a way of coming back to myself. I wanted to acknowledge Eardley’s influence but in a much more playful and more contemporary way.” 

She said finishing Joan’s painting did take an emotional toll. “It became more personal and more emotional. I found it very difficult to decide when it was finished. The faces were the hardest to do. And that when I finally decided it was done, it was laying her to rest, I think, because that was a kind of a full stop.”

Kate Downie: Conversations with Joan is at Glasgow Women’s Library until 25th January