There is no gentle way into the later twentieth-century work of the painter Prunella Clough. It is, as this paper will argue, a difficult kind of realism, embedded in an obdurate poetry of form. But for the viewer of Clough’s visual work or the reader of her extensive notes and diaries, it is also a brutal appraisal of the world at mid-century through an uncompromising reassessment of the process of paintings. “Considerations. Pickaxe etc. Multiple object forms repetitive, why? Cf human forms in assembly” wrote Clough in 1958 at the beginning of a typed page of claims and questions that interrogate her evolving process and subject matter. Written in a characteristic manner, at once telegraphic and peculiarly poetic, Clough is preoccupied here with the machinic and the depiction of mechanical form. She intertwines questions of paint: “warm red (madder) browns & clear Indians [yellows]. With green?” with concerns about composition and scale that also indicate anxieties about dealing with the logic of the machine and the processes under scrutiny. It is “almost meaningless without man or man-scale e.g. bicycle,” she speculates: unless rendered if possible without ascertainable scale as equivalent of traditional landscape (evocative horizon etc) or aesthetic detail (factory objects of mere scrap-abs), or mere lime waste water eg where pipes which had made connection had to be killed (?this). What basic landscape forms remain to be used? What others . . . can be made significant? For “interior” [landscapes] e.g. yards question of man/object grouping & space organising. (Clough, note)
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art
material culture
