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Nancy Clifton (27 July, 1907 - 21 January 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” ( 1) (Alan Warren, The Sun (Melbourne) Sept, 1968).

Life, training and influences.
Nancy Clifton was born Nancy Dobson in (2) 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 (3) for three years and trained in fashion drawing, lettering, copying ads and signage. Her fellow pupils included Rex Battarbee, James Flett, Nutter Buzacott and Beryl Hartland who was to become one of Britain’s top fashion artists.

In 1927 at the age of 20 she started working on the women’s page of the short-lived (4) 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 schoo l where she studied under W.B McInnes and Lindsay Bernard Hall  drawing from life and from plaster casts .(5)

In 1936 at the age of 28 she married (6) 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 (7), a small town in the (8) 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 (9) 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 (10) 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 (11) 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 (12) and the (13). 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 of them (14). 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 (15) and Alan Warren in The Sun called them “a vigorous and refreshing use of the watercolour medium” (16). She won the Maitland Prize for Watercolour twice, in .(17)

In later years she turned to mixed media paintings or 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. (18)

Over the years she took part in a number of exhibitions with other artists, in particular with a group of women that called themselves (namely Mary MacQueen, Barbara Brash, Lesbia Thorpe and Nancy Clifton).(19) She also held one-woman shows, the last of which was at Niagara Galleries in Melbourne in 1984. She died in Melbourne on January 21, 1989 at the age of 81.

Style and reception
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. (1) (7))

Patrick MacCaughey wrote in his review of her first one-woman show of her watercolours (7)

Awards
1966     1st Prize - Maitland Prize for Watercolour

1970     1st Prize -Maitland Prize for Watercolour

Selected group exhibitions
1958   “The Melbourne Graphic artists”, Australian Galleries, Collingwood, Melbourne

1960   “Melbourne Prints”, Johnstone Gallery

1961   Painting, Drawing and Sculpture, Victorian Artists’ Society

1962   Melbourne Prints, Argus Gallery,  Melbourne

1962   Melbourne Printmakers, Gallery A, Melbourne

1963   Philadelphia Print Club, Philadelphia U.S.A.

1966   Maitland Prize for Watercolour: First prize

1967   Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Maude Vizard-Wholohan Art Prize exhibition

1968   Contemporary Art Society of Australia, Argus Gallery, Victoria

1969   (Third) Andrew Fairly Art Prize, Shepparton Art Gallery

1970    Maitland prize for Watercolour: First prize

1971    Contemporary Graphic Arts. Athenaeum, Melbourne

1973.   The Coombe Down-Flinders Gallery, Newtown, Geelong

1974    Australian Watercolour Institute, Blaxland Gallery, Sydney, N.S.W

1976    Australian Watercolour Institute, Sydney

1976    F.E. Richardson Watercolour Purchase, Geelong Art Gallery

1977    National Gallery of Victoria, Relief Prints from collection: Woodcuts and linocuts 19th to 20th century

1978    Group exhibition watercolours, Clive Parry Galleries, Beaumaris, Victoria

1980    Mornington Prints, Women’s Art Exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne

2006    : 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.

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