Prunella Clough
(1919 - 2000) |
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Landscape paintings of printers, fishermen, factory workers and lorry driver subjects Art Work
| Name: |
Prunella Clough |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
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| Nationality: |
British |
| Birth: |
1919 |
| Death: |
2000 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Landscape paintings of printers, fishermen, factory workers and lorry driver subjects |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painter
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Biography
Prunella Clough began her career making figurative paintings of working people and their environments, including Building Site 1956, Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust and paintings of printers, fishermen, factory workers and lorry drivers. She then rejected the depiction of human presence in a literal form, and instead painted urban still life, small areas of lived in and worked in sites, and objects bearing the scars of hard use. Clough described this process of editing down.The problem is finding a form for the urban chaos, because visually any scene in a fully urbanized context is overloaded. It is a problem of reduction, and simultaneously finding a form for the subject.The modernist designer Eileen Gray was Clough's aunt, and is cited as a strong influence upon her, if not in her field of work, in her commitment to it. Clough began training in 1938 at the Chelsea School of Art, initially as a sculptor, changing soon after to painting. The war put an end to her studentship, and she worked for the Office of War Information, drawing maps and charts. In addition to developing a precision that she retained, this may also have spurred Clough into her lasting involvement in the abstraction and distillation of signs from the everyday environment.
Clough's choice of subject matter was in tune with her times. In the foreword for her retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1960, Michael Middleton placed her in the company of Robert Colquhoun, Keith Vaughan and John Minton. Middleton argued that, having experienced the war and its aftermath, these artists developed a romanticism that sprang from the mean streets of the great cities, the casual yet significant gestures of laborers, the bizarre quirks of the human condition in the twentieth century. Revelation, not escape was its aim. Some recent critical attention has related Clough more to French Post Impressionism in her insistence upon the decorative, poetic possibilities of the commonplace. And, in her foreword to Clough's retrospective at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge in 1999, Emma Hill detected a wide range of precursors at work: Magpie like, she has collected from the influences of Cubism, Surrealism, social realism, Abstract Expressionism, and has left from every decade of her work, paintings which are entirely contemporary to their time, yet which exist, in subtle ways poised between what preceded and followed them. Clough's art compels the viewer to marvel at detritus transformed into art. Rubbish lying on a battered surface is the focus of the painting Plastic Bag 1988, Annely Juda Fine Art, London. A bundle of wire is flattened into a series of marks on a canvas but retains its scratchy knotted physicality in Wire and Demolition Tate. Clough sometimes found her finished pieces too elegant, divorced from their origins, and she struggled to retain the awkward edginess of reality. Her search led to a use of diverse media and methods. In addition to paper, board and canvas, she worked on sandpaper and formica. She was also a renowned printmaker, winning a prize for lithography at the Sao Paoio Biennial Exhibition in 1950.Clough's first solo exhibition was held at the Leger Gallery in London in 1947. In the 1960s she showed at the Grosvenor Gallery, during the following two decades at the New Art Centre, and then at Annely Juda Fine Art.
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Samples of Work
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