Scottish artist Joan Eardley

In Scotland, from 1940 to 1963, the artist Joan Eardley produced a cache of monumental seascapes, landscapes, and poignant portraits. When she died aged 42 of breast cancer, people were still trying to categorise her work - part abstract expressionist, part Scottish colourist, part social realist, part kitchen sink (one of her first solo exhibitions was in a cinema). She worked with oil and pastels, but also used collage and plaster on her canvas, as well as gravel and sand and bits of plants (one gallerist scraped these bits off, confused.) She even used graffiti in her portraits of children living in tenements in Glasgow, decades before it became fashionable.

A new exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland hangs Joan's work alongside some of the most cherished and valuable paintings in their collection, including works by Monet and Constable. Curator Kerry Gledhill talks to Antonia Quirke about looking for 'synergies' between the works she has chosen to exhibit, and about Joan's short, passionate, productive life and working practice. We get up close to Eardley's complex, layered canvases, such as Catterline in Winter 1963, and to Monet's Grainstacks Snow Effect 1891. A detailed, celebratory programme about an artist who died on the cusp of international success, leaving behind some of the most startling and covetable paintings of the 20th Century.

Photograph by Audrey Walker, courtesy of the Audrey Walker Estate