Joe Edwards
Ruth Borchard first wrote to Joe Edwards on July 3rd 1961. The self-portrait she purchased is dated '63'. Ruth would have seen The Window: portrait of My Wife (1954) by J. Edwards – rather impressionistically showing a beautiful young woman looking out of a window at a garden – illustrated in black-and-white in Jack Beddington's 1957 book, Young Artists of Promise.
Born in Aberdeen in 1933, Joseph Byres Edwards was around fifty years old when he painted this self-portrait. This may be the one he exhibited with the Aberdeen Artists' Society in 1963 (he exhibited further self-portraits with them in 1964, 1965, 1969 and 1993). Here, he portrays himself as a nervously alert, still young-looking young man. His taut, handsome features and neck strain forward towards us (and towards his own mirrored reflection). His expression is deadpan to the point of rather pained solemnity, the bodily pose awkwardly held – his shoulders appearing stiff, each hand self-consciously holding a brush (the right fist somewhat pugnaciously – or defensively – positioned forward). And yet his strained air co-exists with evident self-awareness; the artist dissects the ambiguities and perplexities of his own character with painstaking precision.
He has painted his face, neck and hands (whose knobbly fingers so tensely hold the brushes) with sensitivity to subtleties of light and shade. The glint in his eyes seems at first to be no more than a literal physical reflection of the light source – but as subtle focal points for the viewer's gaze, they do seem to hint obliquely at some deep source of inner illumination or inspiration, The expansive turquoise blue of his painter's smock or jersey does seem, unconsciously perhaps, to allude to the universal or 'oceanic' qualities of being an artist, who is after all a kind of inner navigator.
Behind his right shoulder is a stone wall inside the bothy that he and his wife Betty went to live in at Home Farm, Kingswells, near Aberdeen, in 1956. Behind the artist's left shoulder, we see a large unframed painting on the bothy wall of an archetypal family group, mother and father and child, conjured up in loose expressionistic brushstrokes. Though each featureless figure is rendered quite distinctively, they also meld together into a sensuous, intimate whole.
A self-portrait (Collection: Mintlaw Discovery Centre, Peterhead), painted twenty-five years later when the artist was fifty-five, depicts a no less serious-looking figure, his thick hair now grey, his features more gaunt and weathered, his expression less vitally intent, now more melancholically resigned and stoic-seeming. This mature, hesitant figure does not nervously thrust his way forward onto the viewer's attention, as in the 1963 self-portrayal, but rather stands still, upright and impassive, holding the tools of his art in his hands (brush in the right, palette in the left), wearing over his brown sweater a jacket of a darker turquoise than that of the smock in the earlier picture. The vigorous, family-celebrating scene of the 1963 self-portrait has been replaced with an elegantly simplified, abstracted backdrop here, made up of a wall divided into a larger rectangle of silvery grey-green and a tree-trunk-like vertical of rusty brown.
Joe Edwards studied at Gray's School of Art, Abderdeen under Robert Sivell (1888 -1958), the Head of Painting. A 1953 portrait of a Young Girl – Phyllis (Collection: Mintlaw Discovery Centre, Peterhead), depicting his sister, ingeniously makes use of a quite high perspective to achieve a sense of psychological distancing from the subject. As such, it is a probing yet detached study of an adolescent girl, with a somewhat troubled, inward-looking look on her attractive face, her cheeks flushed to such a degree that they complement the scarlet of her cardigan. It is interesting and useful to compare such portraits by Edwards with similar works by his teacher Sivell; in this instance, Sivell's portrait of his daughter Elspeth (1941; Collection: Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums), in which the young girl's pensive attitude and sensitive mood are captured through naturalism of an almost hallucinatory clarity and precision.
Edwards's 1954 portrait of Granny (Collection: Mintlaw Discovery Centre, Peterhead) showing a middle-aged woman, seated in an armchair, in comfortable garb of cream-coloured skirt and red cardigan over dark blue top, is characterised by a similar kind of dispassionate naturalism to the point that her sombre, still countenance, relaxed body and prominent hands, take on a quite entrancing and sturdy sculptural quality.
His 1957 portrait of George Findlay, a North East Farmer (Collection: Mintlaw Discovery Centre, Peterhead), also seated in an armchair – depicting a moustachioed, middle-aged man in drab, white collarless shirt and black jacket brightened by a red pocketchief – is also notable for its look of grave, disconsolate reserve as well as a dignified tenacity. These fine, early, sensitive, psychologically searching portraits of family members and neighbours by Edwards deserve to be much better known.
In 1954, Edwards was called up for National Service. Demobbed in 1956, he married Betty, who had also studied at Gray's, and started painting works such as The Midden and Farm Shed – views from the bothy door at Home Farm. Profiling Edwards in the northeast Scotland-based Leopard Magazine (July 1995), when the artist was showing works at the Scottish Agricultural Museum at Ingliston, Duncan Comrie wrote: 'It was the farmer at Home Farm, George Findlay, who was to trigger off Joe's painting of life on the farm. The portrait of George Findlay... aged 78, took Joe 12 sittings to capture for posterity the character of a north-east farmer. A face whose features, although weathered by the sun, wind and rain, retain the freshness of youth. The eyes glow with strength tempered by experience. In contrast to the dungarees of farmer Bill Reid's portrait (aged 34), Findlay's collarless shirt, jacket and waistcoat are evidence of another way of farming, a way changing as Joe painted it.'
In 1959, Joe and his wife moved to a nearby cottage at Fairley, Kingswells. In the same year he painted a portrait of fellow artist members of the Aberdeen-based Adelphi Group. His vigorously sketchy 1961 painting of a mother feeding her young child, now in the collection of Aberdeen Art Gallery, shows how swiftly perceptive he was when capturing universal human relationships.
Two portraits, Big Fisherman (1961) and Fisherman with Creel (1965) (both Collection: Mintlaw Discovery Centre, Peterhead) – the first figure a stalwart, ginger-bearded young man rowing in a small craft, the second a clean-shaven man holding a basket of glinting newly-caught creel in a broad embrace, in the corner of a larger boat – show Edwards's characteristic emphatic realism (up till now) dissolving into a diaphanous and yet still quite tautly defined expressionism, in which elemental strength of human character among ever-fluid elements of sea and sky are supply and movingly evoked.
A 1962 double portrait, The Demolishers, depicting two sullen, rather wary-looking labourers in boots, dungarees and cloth caps, is still naturalistic but with something of the more diffuse, less hard-edged quality of the fishermen portraits.
A highly realistic 1985 portrait of Lord Provost Alec Collie, commissioned by Aberdeen Council, and now owned by the City Art Gallery, is properly formal yet humane in feeling; the daylight falling on the impeccably attired subject's hands and head is skilfully rendered. In a series of mural paintings, including Harvesters (1966) (Collection: National Museum of Rural Life, East Kilbride) and Plough - Song of the Earth (1967), Edwards evokes, through gorgeous, golden cadences reminiscent both of Samuel Palmer and the neo-Romantics, immemorial yet now fast-changing cycles of rural life around Kingswells. Paintings such as Planters and Singling (thinning seedling plants), (both 1970 and both Collection: National Museum of Rural Life, East Kilbride), and Tattie Hawkers (1974), depict toiling local farmers and farm labourers. In these, Edwards dynamically semi-abstracted and choreographed the essential kinetic rhythms of their work, as in some timeless or archetypal ballet.
In 1999, the year before he died, Edwards generously donated sixteen of his works to Aberdeenshire Council Museums. From 1st April to 27th June 2017, this entire collection was displayed in 'The Joseph Byres Edwards Exhibition' at the Arbuthnot Museum, Peterhead.