WHEN acclaimed Scottish artist Joyce Cairns began her painting career, she was vastly outnumbered by men.
“That’s the story of my early life – it was always more men than women,” she told the Sunday National.
Despite the inequality, her talent was recognised with scholarships and awards and in 2018 she became the first female president of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA). Now, to mark the Academy’s 200th year, a celebration is being held of much of Cairns’s work.
A Personal Odyssey spans seven decades of Cairns’s career, from early drawings and paintings to the dramatic maritime scenes inspired by her home in the former fishing village of Footdee. The exhibition also features monumental works from her landmark War Tourist series.
Born in Edinburgh in 1947, Cairns was expected by her family to become a nurse but left her training to accept a place at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen.
Here, teaching remained firmly rooted in traditional artistic training, with a strong emphasis on life drawing, anatomy and composition. The predominantly male staff and student body reflected the entrenched sexism of Scottish art education at the time, yet Cairns’s exceptional ability was recognised.
After Gray’s she won a place at the Royal College of Art in London, supporting her three years of study with cleaning and chambermaiding jobs.
“I have a lot of transferable skills from that time although my late husband, Robert, used to wonder where my chambermaiding skills had gone,” she laughed.
“It was quite a feather in your cap to get into the Royal College in those days though. I remember there were three or four of us from Scotland and it was very different to what we were used to. It was kind of posh. They threw a party in the first year and gave us sherry in dinky little glasses so we nicked a bottle and went behind the chaise longue to drink it.”
Near the end of the three years, Cairns channelled twinges of homesickness into an ambitious painting called Dreaming of Auchronie and Berry Hill. which made her debut at the Royal Scottish Academy Annual Exhibition in 1971.
That same year, Cairns won the RSA Carnegie Travelling Scholarship and used the £150 award to travel all over Italy, hitch-hiking and travelling by train. On returning to begin her studies at the Royal College of Art, these influences became increasingly evident in works such as Requiem for a Soul, the panelled structure recalling a medieval altarpiece.
By 1975 Cairns had been in art schools for nearly 10 years with her family beginning to think she would be drawing her old age pension while still a student. Unsure of what to do next, she enrolled for teacher training and then was delighted to be asked to teach at Gray’s in Aberdeen.
“I have to say I love teaching and I hope I gave as much back as I got from the students,” she said.
This period saw a new departure for Cairns’s work as she was living in the historic fishing village of Footdee (known locally as Fittie) at the mouth of Aberdeen Harbour.
The village’s terraced cottages, communal greens and distinctive fishing sheds became the stage set for her paintings.
Against the backdrop of Aberdeen’s oil boom, Cairns populated these works with a motley cast of characters brought in with the ships.
While her earlier work drew on a personal, symbolic language inspired by pre-Renaissance art, the Fittie paintings are firmly grounded in contemporary life. Wry humour sits alongside psychological tension in crowded scenes filled with ships, cats, gulls, empty bottles and domestic clutter.
Cairns took early retirement in 2004 in order to work on a major show at Aberdeen Art Gallery called War Tourist. This stemmed from the impact of conflict on her own family.
Her father rarely discussed his service during the Second World War and her mother lived with severe depression brought about by wartime trauma.
Her mother’s death in 1983 opened a “Pandora’s Box” which led to paintings like They Said The War Was Partly To Blame reflecting painful memories of childhood and the lasting effect of war on family life.
Seeking a deeper understanding of her father’s wartime experiences, Cairns retraced his military service in Tunisia as a Cameron Highlander serving with the First Army where he was awarded an MBE and later followed his route through Normandy, where he served with the Third Infantry Division and was mentioned in dispatches. Further research took her across Germany, Austria, Czechia and Poland, including visits to former concentration camps and ghettos. Contemporary conflicts, such as the Gulf War and the Bosnian War, also informed the developing series.
“They’re very dark – none of my work is easy,” said Cairns.
Not all of them are in the forthcoming exhibition.
“They’re big paintings,” she explained. “One man, who wanted four of them, got them shipped out to Singapore where they had to take the windows out of his offices in a skyscraper and be taken up in a crane.”
Cairns said she was honoured her work had been chosen for such a major exhibition in the bicentennial year of the RSA, which now has many more female members than when she first joined.
“When I was elected to the academy in 1986 there were only six female members and 70 male members so that was actually breaking ground even then,” she said. “Things have altered now. It’s not half and half but it’s certainly gone a long way to represent women.”
Her years as President of the RSA were interrupted by the Covid lockdowns but she was instrumental in the way the bicentenary is being marked, according to the current director Colin Greenslade.
“Her guidance, through those pandemic years, ensured that the plans for this special anniversary were exciting and achievable,” he said. “She would never have planned her own exhibition for this year – she is far too modest for that. No, the coercing for Joyce’s work to be celebrated in this way was all our doing.”
Joyce W Cairns: A Personal Odyssey will run from August 1 to September 2 at the RSA in Edinburgh
