joaneardley

114d

Pale yellow letters
humbly straggling across
the once brilliant red
of a broken shop-face
CONFECTIO…

—Edwin Morgan, “To Joan Eardley”
Joan Eardley (1921–1963) was born #OTD, 18 May

🖼️ Joan Eardley, “Sweet Shop, Rotten Row, 1960–1961”, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow

https://www.gla.ac.uk/collections/#/details?irn=59156&catType=C

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #art #visualart #painting #20thcentury #JoanEardley

"To Joan Eardley"
by Edwin Morgan

Pale yellow letters
humbly straggling across
the once brilliant red
of a broken shop-face
CONFECTIO
and a blur of children
at their games, passing,
gazing as they pass
at the blur of sweets
in the dingy, cosy
Rottenrow window –
an Eardley on my wall.
Such rags and streaks
that master us! –
that fix what the pick
and bulldozer have crumbled
to a dingier dust,
the living blur
fiercely guarding
energy that has vanished,
cries filling still
the unechoing close!
I wandered by the rubble
and the houses left standing
kept a chill, dying life
in their islands of stone.
No window opened
as the coal cart rolled
and the coalman’s call
fell coldly to the ground.
But the shrill children
jump on my wall.

“Sweet Shop, Rotten Row”. A painting by Joan Eardley. Oil paint is applied thickly, in blotches of colour. A mustard-yellow sign bearing the letters CONFECTIO sits above a blurred shop front, showing a green window on the left and a red door on the right. Three almost abstract figures of children – two girls and a boy, probably – are dashing past the shop from left to right in a swirl of pinks, browns, and blues. The leftmost child has long black hair streaming out behind her head, adding to the sense of swift movement.

1 0 0 View Post & Replies See Original