Prunella Clough 1919-1999
Small Gate Painting VII, 1980
oil on canvas
25 by 26 inches
signed verso, with the artist's printed label verso

Provenance
The Artist
Private Collection, USA

Exhibited
London, Warwick Arts Trust, Prunella Clough, New Paintings 1979-82, cat no.27, illus colour



While Prunella Clough's paintings might appear at first glance to be purely abstract they were always, in fact, sparked by something she had seen on walks in London or on her travels around the country - a discarded glove, a fragment of fence, a car window or plastic bag.
Clough made a series of painting in the early eighties inspired by factory gates. Time and again she took inspiration from surfaces which can be seen through (gates, mesh fences, woven cloths, fishing nets) or structures which unwittingly framed the wider landscape (car doors, gates,wind-screens). Her paintings replicate the optical sensation of looking at such objects, the viewers eye, like an unruly auto-focussing camera, switching between the near and far, the painted surface and the pictorial space. Clough's interrogation of gridded surfaces and her depiction of space via a painterly language were very much the concerns of the International Modern Artist. She dismissed the notion that her choice of British industrial and urban subject matter had any deep neo-romantic or political significance. Acknowledging that such places were 'exotic' to her, it is more true to say that her attraction lay in the aesthetic strangeness of such places. Already one step removed from everyday human activity, many of the manufactured objects she found there were already unfamiliar enough to be viewed from the outset as abstract elements which could be used for painting. Just as the St Ives artists found a subject in the Cornish landscape, Clough found the raw material for her paintings in Lowestoft Harbour and the industrial areas around Battersea, Wandsworth and Harlesden.
With such delicately painted surfaces and often close-toned colour palettes, Clough's paintings achieve a sensitivity born from a lifetime of careful looking. While photographs of her 'finds' do exist - black and white snapshots detailing gates, fishing nets or padlocks and the like - she did not closely refer to them while painting, preferring to put down these visual traces and tactile surfaces as she remembered them.