Fishing nets, Catterline

'When I'm painting in the north east - I hardly ever move out of the village. I hardly ever move from one spot. I find the more I know the place, the more I know the particular spot, the more I find to paint in that particular spot. I do feel the more you know something the more you can get out of it - the more it gives you. I very often find I'll take my paint to a certain place that has moved me and I'll begin to paint there and I find perhaps by the end of the summer I haven't moved from that place - my paintings are still there and I've worn a kind of mark in the ground and I leave my paints there overnight ... A studio seems to have arrived outside and that seems to be how I work' (extract form tape recording in the Joan Eardley archive, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art).

Eardley returned frequently to the subject of salmon nets during her stays in Catterline. In the present painting her free gestural paintwork is contained within a carefully constructed work. Brilliant touches of colour in key positions in the composition reveal her schooled eye for balance and dynamism (F. Pearson, exhibition catalogue, Joan Eardley, Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland, 2007, p. 9).