Draft:Nancy Clifton

Nancy Clifton (1907 – 1989) was an Australian artist who was known for her printmaking, painting and mixed media works on paper. Her works were praised for their "technical know-how combined with intensity of feeling".

Nancy Clifton was born Nancy Dobson in Brunswick, Melbourne on 27 July 1907. As an only child she spent much of her childhood reading and drawing, and her father encouraged her to go to art school. She attended the Leyshon White Commercial Art School for three years and trained in fashion drawing, lettering, copying ads and signage. Her fellow pupils included Rex Battarbee, and Beryl Hartland, who was to become one of Great Britain's top fashion artist.

In 1927 at the age of 20 she started working on the women's page of the short-lived Morning Post (1925-1927) illustrating women's and children's fashions, but the Great Depression caused the paper to close down. One of her colleagues there was a young cartoonist Alex Gurney. She then took a series of jobs, drawing blue-prints for architects, copying display units in stores for catalogues, doing fashion drawings, and designing theatre sets and costumes for amateur theatricals. At the same time she took night classes at the National Gallery of Victoria art school where she studied under W.B McInnes and Lindsay Bernard Hall drawing from both life and plaster casts.

In 1936 at the age of 28 she married Allan Clifton (author of Time of Fallen Blossoms, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York in 1951) and had three children in the following four years. In 1942 when the war broke out and her husband went into the army (recruited by the Australian government for his knowledge of Japanese), she moved with her three small children to Birregurra, a small town in the Western District of Victoria and was cut off from all cultural life, except reading.

In 1948 she returned to Melbourne and resumed family life with her husband. She visited galleries and became interested in modern art. Then she taught art history and art in Ivanhoe Girls Grammar School from 1951 until she retired in 1971. At the same time she resumed her own art work. She became interested in print-making and in the late 1950's took classes in lithography, etching and wood-cuts at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology now RMIT University. There she met and worked with well-known artists who used the printing presses for their own work, among them Fred Williams. That group of artists went on to form the first Australian print group called Melbourne Prints or the Melbourne Graphic Artists. They held their first exhibition in 1958, and she exhibited with them for three years.

During this period she produced many black and white wood-cuts and lino cuts, influenced by artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and the German Expressionists. They are figurative, mainly portraits of people she saw around her in the city - old migrant women, women with children, lonely old men, young athletes and members of her own family. The National Gallery of Australia acquired thirty of them. Her output was small, but enough to exhibit each year.

In 1963 she made her first trip abroad and travelled to Italy, Paris, Madrid and London, visiting all the major museums. In London she was particularly impressed by J. M. W. Turner's late watercolours and also those by Emil Nolde, and on her return to Australia she began to paint in that medium, fascinated by the transparency of pure colour and the way it overlapped. She abandoned figures and drawing and her watercolours became entirely abstract representations of the Australian landscape, its light, contours and colours. She had her first one-woman show of watercolours at Gallery 99 in 1968. Patrick McCaughey, the art critic for The Age (a Melbourne newspaper) gave her work a review referring to "a floating lyricism, distinctive and genuine" and Alan Warren in The Sun called them "a vigorous and refreshing use of the watercolour medium". She won the Maitland watercolour prize twice, in 1966 and 1970.

In later years she turned to mixed media paintings (collages), combining the abstraction of her watercolours with the "realism" of added elements such as newspaper cuttings, labels, handwriting, people's names, photos and tissue paper. These collages are extremely complex, in vibrant colours, and many of them are deeply personal, intended for a child, grandchild or friend.

Over the years she took part in a number of exhibitions, sometimes with other artists. In particular with the "From Tuesday to Tuesday" group who met every Tuesday (Mary MacQueen, Barbara Brash, Lesbia Thorpe and Nancy Clifton). She also held in one-woman shows, the last of which was in 1984 at Niagara Galleries in Melbourne. She died in Melbourne on January 21, 1989 at the age of 81.

Style and reception valuation
Nancy Clifton's works were praised for their intensity of feeling and mastery of technique whether it be in her stark black and white prints or her watercolours and collages.

Patrick MacCaughey wrote in his review of her first one-woman show of her watercolours, "These watercolours have a quiet undemonstrative finesse that marks the real artist off from the sensitive amateur".

Awards
1966     1st Prize - Maitland Prize for Watercolour

1970     1st Prize - Maitland Prize for Watercolour

Selected group exhibitions

 * 1958   "The Melbourne Graphic artists", Australian Gallery, Melbourne
 * 1973    Ian Armstrong, Barbara Brash, Nancy Clifton, John Borrack, Arch Cuthbertson, Mary MacQueen, Anne Montgomery, David Newbury, and others. The Coombe Down-Flinders Gallery, 327 Shannon Avenue, Newtown, Geelong
 * 2006    "From Tuesday to Tuesday": prints by Nancy Clifton, Mary MacQueen, Barbara Brash and Lesbia Thorpe, in the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery

Selected solo exhibitions
1968       Gallery 99, Melbourne, Watercolours

1974       Flinders Gallery, Geelong, Watercolours

1975       Europa Gallery, Melbourne

1975       The Excelsior Hotel, Hong Kong

1978       Gallery de Tastes, Melbourne, Watercolours

1981       Niagara Galleries, Melbourne. Prints, Collages

1984       Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, Watercolours

Represented
Nancy Clifton is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria, The Newcastle Art Gallery, N.S.W., the Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria, The Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, The Campbell Hughston Collection, Latrobe Valley Arts Centre, and is extensively represented in private collections in Australia, England and France.