Prunella Clough 1919 - 1999

The New Art Centre, London no: 1067/29

Prunella Clough was an important painter and printmaker and an influential teacher whose star has deservedly risen in the decade since her death five days short of the millennium

While ‘ Bone Drawing’ belongs to it’ s time in using an austere, ration book colour range, comprising khaki, olive, faded orange, grey and beige, this small but distinctive painting anticipates the artist’ s later work in which ‘ found’ , discarded or obsolete objects from the surrounding natural or industrial environment were presented as mysterious icons and cryptic symbols. As Bryan Robertson declared in Clough’ s ‘ Independent’ obituary, Clough ‘ brought to this unpromising material a subtly calculating eye and a pictorial intelligence intent upon metamorphosis, rejecting nostalgia in favour of a crisply articulated synthesis between visible fact and subjective memory, essences and remnants’ *1 Cloughs visual editing was sophistication incarnate, apparent early on in the still-figurative neo-romantic compositions of Lowestoft fishermen and lorry drivers.

As her work slowly but surely adapted single objects or fragments of a landscape scene towards the broader plastic treatment of abstraction so the textural and chromatic surface became an independent cipher for her artistic imagination.

‘ Bone Drawing’ was preceded by ‘ Seascape and Bones’ (1945), Manchester City Art Gallery’ s ‘ Dead Bird’ (1945) and the Tate’ s ‘ The White Root’ (1946) works that shared with ‘ Bone Drawing’ a focus on stripped down elemental forms replete with surreal qualities inherited from Max Ernst or Paul Nash

*1 Bryan Robertson ‘ The Independent’ 29/12/99

The New Art Centre, London
Private Collection, U.K.

Frances Spalding, Prunella Clough: regions unmapped, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2012, p.131 pl. no. 84 (col.)

London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Prunella Clough, September – October 1960, no. 74 (Arts Council), touring to City Art Gallery, York; College of Art, Bournemouth; Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry; Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries; Arts Council Gallery, Cambridge; Art Gallery, Blackburn; Art Gallery, Derby
Camden Art Centre, London, 2015

By the 1950s Clough had turned her attention away from beachscapes towards the urban environment and themes of labour.  The industrial landscape became a source of endless fascination for her, as Britain rebuilt and regenerated itself in the years following the war. She turned her gaze away from the shingle beaches of North Suffolk towards Thameside cranes, lorries on inner city building sites and workers in factories.

Chance encounters with discarded objects in builder’s yards or on construction sites now began to hold her attention. Configurations on a crumbling plaster wall or an arresting shape of an unidentified object outside a factory gate could produce surprising results. Wastelands and urban dereliction provided a series of new shapes, colours and textures and a catalogue of visual information with which to create her paintings. Clough made economical use of colour making it sing out from within the grids and meshes of her painted textures. 

Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Prunella Clough ‘Retrospective Exhibition’, Sept – Oct 1960, no:121

Clough’s imagery became increasingly abstracted over the course of the 1950s. Her use of colour developed a monochromatic quality while her placement of objects reveals an acute formal awareness. At first glance the flattened forms and fields of textures appear to be abstracted inventions, however, they are always rooted in observation and derived from things she saw. Clough got into the habit of making field notes to use in the studio later. Sometime these took the form of pencil drawings and sketches, which recorded interesting shapes and outlines. Sometimes she carried her camera with her to take what she called her ‘source photographs’ of surprising silhouettes, interesting shapes or chance marks. ‘I occasionally take rough photos, but often do not refer to them; they are only approximate aids for the memory.’ She said. These visual aides memoires were sometimes reinforced with a complex, almost poetic method of taking down descriptive, written notes in an abbreviated, unpunctuated way:

Consider final intention which is to be conveyed on larger scale. i.e. nature of urban building. Old/tachy and new/slick, (which implies urban skyline and sky density), & includes the non-directly industrial i.e. roads, posters etc. nature of immediate man-surroundings e.g. scrap, tools (lorries) etc; nature of urban /(rural) waste ground.

Once back in to studio, these visual and written notations fused together with her recollections of objects and environments while she worked them out with pigment on the surface of her paintings.

Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Prunella Clough ‘Retrospective Exhibition’, Sept – Oct 1960, no:127. plate XIV (illus)
The New Art Gallery, London

The curious shapes of pieces of piping, tubing, taps, stopcocks and valves, which Clough observed in factories, appear in several prints and paintings of the fifties. The raw, visual material that she collected in her notebooks and photographs underwent a rigourous transformation before they were locked into position and carefully composed into a pictorial configuration. The landscape that which preoccupied her generally contained geometric configurations derived from various sources such as the triangular gable ends of buildings, or the bars on a factory gate. One they were included in her paintings she frequently lamented the resulting, elegant composition:

There is a vast discrepancy between the rawness of the original experience, walking around in any kind of urban wasteland, and the relatively tidied up and composed painting that comes from it. The trouble is that I have a lifetime’s preoccupation with construction, layout: the traditional checks and balances.

The Artist

New Art Centre, London

Sothebys London March 2008

Private collection, UK

The New Art Centre, London, no:106/25

For paintings such as Oblique I, inspiration came from surprising and unexpected sources. Clough’s ‘source photos’ and sketchbooks indicate that a patch of worn paint or tarmac might generate a compositional idea or even an entire painting. Thickly painted, thermoplastic road markings on a familiar walk, could easily find themselves rearranged and transferred to one of her paintings. Similarly, a row of twisted, steel rebars sticking out of a reinforced concrete wall could catch her eye.  The random positioning of the hook profiles here set up a rhythmic idea which contrasts with the more angular, geometric patterning.

A curious feature of Clough’s technique was not only the manner in which she applied pigment, but also the way in which she removed it from surface of her canvasses; this was part of a never-ending quest to create interesting surface textures. Paint would be scraped and gouged off the surface while it was still wet, or even after it had dried and abrasive scourers would be used to scrub away a patch of pigment to achieved a more varied and pictorially interesting effect.

Annely Juda Fine Art, London

Ken Powell

Thence by descent

Clough’s title offers few clues as to how we might interpret her painting Forest Floor. In many ways she presents us with a visual puzzle and a challenge to untangle and decode her enigmatic forms. This is frequently the case with her work since titles usually occurred to her while she was in the process of painting or even long after she had completed a picture. While it may often appear to be abstract, she repeatedly stated that her subject matter was essentially based on some kind of observation:

Nothing that I do is ‘abstract’. I can locate all the ingredients of a painting in the richness of the outside world, the world of perception.

Clough generally worked in a conventional manner and with orthodox materials. For example, she made detailed preparatory studies as she began work on a painting. However, her paintings are also the products of several layers of experience and ritual. Her creative stages included aspects of observation, filtered memory, accumulated understanding and hands-on experimentation with materials. She claimed that it was landscape, in particular, which was the root of her imagery and all her painted forms, no matter how strange or ambiguous, were derived from observation or memory of some kind of landscape:

I see my subject mainly as landscape, but the kind of landscape I am dealing with is something I can not match up to…I have the mind of a northern romantic which tends towards the atmospheric…This may be the wind and the weather of English and not just northern romanticism.

Forest Floor is one of Clough’s most romantic paintings. The scraping away of pigment from the surface of canvas has formed a set of dark, curious shapes rising up from the lower edge of the composition. These organic forms, suggestive of undergrowth, demonstrate that the removal of pigment in her work creates as much pictorial interest as does its application. She has capitalized on chance marks and harnessed accidental smudges, stains and smears transforming them into landscape elements and combining them with the suggestion of a moonlit scene or reflections in blue water. Here and there, the application of a luminous colour sings out from the configuration of shadowy, tangled forms.

Annely Juda Fine Art, London, Prunella Clough ‘The Late Paintings and selected earlier works’,1 November – 16 December 2000, no.43

In 1983 Clough moved from Moore Park Road to a new studio in Sherbrook Road about a mile away. Close by, North End Road market, filled with traders six days a week, proved to be a visual treasure trove and a source of endless delight. The open stalls and shops piled high with all sorts of fancy goods provided her with plenty of visual stimulation and inspiration. She took several ‘source photographs’ of the mops, washing up bowls, clotheshorses and feather dusters outside one of her favourite shops. The coloured plastic buckets, children’s toys and cheap, garish goods seemed incongruous next to the more practical workman’s tools and domestic utensil. In her inimitable shorthand, she recorded a series of colour-notes regarding these ‘trinkets’:

‘ART TULIPS’, ‘NOVELTIES & JOKES’, ‘MAGICAL MYSTERY LANDSCAPES (glitter)’, ‘CELTIC STYLE Big shiny summer Balls, orange net ranging from violet (red/gr edge) to yellow’ and ‘SHRINKWRAP velvet “kebab”

She embarked on a series of paintings featuring brightly coloured forms and brash shapes. This was indicative of her renewed, fresh vision and a calculated denial of her sophisticated, perceptual experience. The curious configurations are often detached from the rest of the composition like floating fragments of half-remembered objects, while bursts of colour enliven and activate the entire composition.

Annely Juda Fine Art, London
Private Collection UK

The Mall Galleries, London
Olympia, London, Prunella Clough, 2-7 March 2004, no: PC:209

Clough frequently made use of templates and stencils to construct her background textures. Here she has employed a piece of wooden garden trellis to supply a geometric framework with which set off the flower-like form in the foreground. Some of the lozenge shapes between the lattice criss- crossings have detached themselves and float off to other parts of the composition. This method of constructing her paintings involved searching out appropriate objects to help in the process of building up the tactile quality of her surfaces. Visits to the garden centre or the hardware shop for materials were as frequent as those to the art shop, but despite these surprising shopping trip Clough maintained:

My paintings are really quite traditionally made objects, in practice. I take a thing from the real world, detach it and put it into a painting. Something takes over that goes further than anything I can logically describe or assess.  

Annely Juda Fine Art, London; Private Collection UK

Olympia, London, Prunella Clough 2-7 March 2004, no: PC:210

In 1983 Clough moved from Moore Park Road to a new studio in Sherbrook Road about a mile away. Close by, North End Road market, filled with traders six days a week, proved to be a visual treasure trove and a source of endless delight. The open stalls and shops piled high with all sorts of fancy goods provided her with plenty of visual stimulation and inspiration. She took several ‘source photographs’ of the mops, washing up bowls, clotheshorses and feather dusters outside one of her favourite shops. The coloured plastic buckets, children’s toys and cheap, garish goods seemed incongruous next to the more practical workman’s tools and domestic utensil. In her inimitable shorthand, she recorded a series of colour-notes regarding these ‘trinkets’:

‘ART TULIPS’, ‘NOVELTIES & JOKES’, ‘MAGICAL MYSTERY LANDSCAPES (glitter)’, ‘CELTIC STYLE Big shiny summer Balls, orange net ranging from violet (red/gr edge) to yellow’ and ‘SHRINKWRAP velvet “kebab”

She embarked on a series of paintings featuring brightly coloured forms and brash shapes. This was indicative of her renewed, fresh vision and a calculated denial of her sophisticated, perceptual experience. The curious configurations are often detached from the rest of the composition like floating fragments of half-remembered objects, while bursts of colour enliven and activate the entire composition.

Annely Juda Fine Art, London, Prunella Clough ‘The Late Paintings and selected earlier works’, 1 November -16 December 2000, no.34
Olympia, London, Prunella Clough, 2-7 March 2004, no: PC:217

Broken Vane is representative of Clough’s late style with the ‘all-over’, textured field operating as a background on which to superimpose a curious, decorative or interesting form. During the 1990s a new-found minimalism dictated the way she created her compositions as she paired away pictorial forms. Her very specific title here directs our thoughts towards some sort of damaged, mechanical device which is operated by wind or rushing air. The circularity of the design brings to mind a fan or propeller and this is reinforced by the light airiness of the surrounding space. Nevertheless, the imagery remains loose and ambiguous enough to allow other possibilities and interpretations. While creating her ‘background’ fields, Clough frequently produced uniform textures with neutralized colours and a restrained use of brushwork. While this may sound unpromising as a pictorial ingredient, the discreet, chromatic shifts and feathery application generated layers of shifting and translucent textures.  

During the 1990s Clough fashioned together a series of collages and paintings made with the assistance of string, rope, cord and even typewriter ribbons. These were variously rolled or steeped in paint and then pressed against the surface of the canvas. The resulting useful marks were maintained and enhanced while others which failed to meet with her approval, were obliterated. Snake like-forms and meandering lines flow across the surface of her canvases connecting forms together or providing guy ropes with which to tie the composition together. These sparse, though carefully positioned, pictorial incidents were enough to provide interesting visual incidents to a painting. If an idea was rich enough, or if Clough found herself unable to leave an interesting train of thought, she would go on investigating it in several paintings simultaneously producing an entire series of related works.

Austin Desmond Fine Art, London
Private Collection France

Shown in her first exhibition in March 1947 at the Leger Galleries, Deserted Gravel Pit demonstrates a transition from the Suffolk beaches towards man-made environments such as quarries or, in this case, a gravel pit. Twisted, red forms and the remnants of unrequired scaffolding, suggesting dreamlike presences, are the only inhabitants of this abandoned landscape. They act as markers of man’s presence, now rusted and corroded by the elements.

I see my subject mainly as landscape, but the kind of landscape I am dealing with is something I cannot match up to…I have the mind of a northern romantic which tends towards the atmospheric…This is maybe the wind and the weather of English, and not just northern, romanticism. 

Leicester Galleries, London, 1956
Mrs E. D. Scott-Kilvert
Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London
Osborne Samuel, London

London, Leicester Galleries, New Year Exhibition, January 1956, no. 103

Both formally and thematically Clough sought understatement, mysterious innuendo and a focus on minutiae in which subliminal pattern added to the sensual richness and suggestiveness of surface a criss-cross of the closed gate at rear is echoed in the ropes binding barrels under a Christo-like wrapping. The inert, anonymous workers – proletarian personages – stand impassively between the artful, indeed sculptural, ‘ stack’ of metal cylinders that form the barrels and the gated wall of the background. Everything is suggested through visual analogy and sensual, tactile association between shape, form, and functional meaning. The atmosphere is once again still and momentary yet, at the same time, timeless. In a light-hearted moment Clough told her friend David Carr “I take refuge with ice barrels and Lowestoft baskets”. The devil was in the detail for Clough and her oblique empathy with the working man in the industrial environment resisted overt political and moral rhetoric. Clough was a neutral in both art and life, and her manner of bridging the gap between the two was based on a depiction of the mundane, humdrum and ordinary aspects of the late industrial world using the intimate terms of formal analysis, aesthetic scrutiny and visual contemplation. Frances Spalding explains how Clough’ s paintings “do not make heroes of her labourers, nor show them to be victims of an oppressive system” .

Osborne Samuel, London

Prunella Clough – Prints and Works on Paper, Flowers Graphics, London, no:19 (illus)

A printer’s proof aside from the edition of 25