Prunella Clough : ‘…have to keep pushing stones up hills’

Osborne Samuel, London

During the mid-1950s Clough’ s renowned interest in industrial themes dominated her subject matter. Working harbours such as Lowestoft, lorry drivers, print making technicians at the London art schools where she taught, and manual workers peopled her compositions. These labourers were however generic, rather than individualistic and were intimately connected with their working environments. The solitary figure in Barrels in a Yard focuses attention at compositional mid-point and acts as guardian of the encased freight being processed in the yard. Further site-specific details are absent, so we could be at a dockyard, a pub, a factory or an unloading bay. The palette is similarly restricted, in this example to a dirty cream and blue-grey scheme that tonally unifies the picture, the sole chromatic highlight provided by the circular acid yellow of one of the barrels. The spatial context is also established through a dark grey foreground column at right that pushes the rest of the picture back into a distanced atmospheric recess.

It is clear that Clough commonly subjected the thematic material of her art to a stringent formalist criterion; in other words specific figurative sources were almost afterthoughts – a kind of iconographic camouflage – grafted onto the main abstract idea. The interplay between the mysterious and the overtly commonplace gives a compelling ambiguity to Clough’ s work, the popularity of which continues to grow with time. Perhaps this appeal is based on Michael Harrison’ s contention that Clough’ s, “painting language was not just that of a painter, but also of a wartime cartographer, a graphic designer in her youth and a life-long printmaker”.

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

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.  

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Having painted Lowestoft fishermen for some time, and made use of their netting and tackle as pictorial ingredients, Clough then turned her attention inland, towards the builders and labourers, lorry drivers and construction workers of the inner city. She called these her ‘Lorry-landscapes’. The theme was emblematic of the optimism and regenerative forces opperating in post-war Britain at the time. It provided her with a readymade contemporary subject and one that, hitherto, had been unexplored.

When I was painting factories and lorry drivers in the fifties, it seemed that there were innumerable situations in which one saw people in ways that had never been realized pictorially. Specifically I could relate a ladder or a lorry driver’s truck to the surrounding landscape because both were industrial products and part of an industrial landscape.

The lorry driver paintings were an attempt to introduce the figure into a contemporary urban landscape without the devices of the past, without the myths of Mars and Venus or the legends of Breughel. I was trying to update the classical Western concern with the figure without benefit of religious or mythical context. That’s is why the lorry drivers were in their cabs, because the lorry was so much a part of the mechanical landscape and provided a link with it.

Signed lower left

Exhibited:

Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Prunella Clough – ‘Retrospective Exhibition’ Sept – Oct 1960, no:22. plate V (illus)

Literature:

Frances Spalding Prunella Clough ‘regions unmapped’ Lund Humphries, 2012 (p.100 no.57 (illus))

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.

See: Frances Spalding Prunella Clough ‘ regions unmapped’ Lund Humphries, 2012 (p.26 no.14)

This gouache and watercolour is a preparatory study for Clough’s first signed and dated oil painting of any significance. It represents an incongruous shoreline still life comprising various objects discovered on walks along the north Suffolk beach: seaweed fronds, driftwood, shells, bleached bones, some washed-up netting and pieces of rusted metal. The dreamlike atmosphere to this assemblage of objets trouvé demonstrates the effect that Surrealism had on the young artist. Even at this formative stage, we can already observe many of the ingredients that are celebrated in Clough’s later work including a fascination for found or discarded objects, an assemblage of disparate, seemingly unrelated forms, a love of interesting texture and surface and, above all, the re-invention of a well-known genre. 

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.  

Private Collection, France

Dozens of Clough’s painting are untitled. This is not because she did not get round to naming them but because she felt that a title was unrequired. Sometimes she gave works very specific and deliberate titles which, when considered in conjunction with the imagery, intentionally directed the viewer’s response towards the painting. At other times, her pictorial imagery was so rich and suggestive that the painting remained nameless. This ‘Untitled’ work from 1967 has characteristics in common such as the suggestion of a horizon line on which a large, box-like form hangs. This is in-filled with structured, horizontal stripes, tiers and layers. The sandwiching of coloured stratum carries suggestions of landscape or the cross-section of a geological structure. Clough maintained that landscape was at the heart of most of her painting and that she employed colour ‘intuitively with no conceptual or intellectual control or understanding.’