User:Katlou 1984/sandbox

Biography
English painter, draughtsman and printmaker. Her father was a civil servant and her aunt was the modern designer Eileen Gray. She attended the Chelsea School of Art in London (1938–9), but when her studies were interrupted by World War II she became an engineer's draughtsman and mapper (1940–45). Her early work is characterised by the proletarian subject-matter of labour and the urban landscape described within a narrow tonal range. Towards the end of her life she became regarded largely as an abstractionist, but her work always retained a figurative base, as if form had been filtered through memory. During the 1950s she introduced plant motifs into her urban scenes. Clough’s work combined casual and studied observations of the everyday:  the banal detritus of common objects, the incursion of nature into the urban environment, and mans’ attempts to subjugate the natural.

In the late 1960s Clough's style became even freer in terms of colour and scale, but it still revealed her continuing fascination with the ‘edginess' of form, the sudden intrusion of hard shapes into softer areas. From 1946 to 1951 Clough produced etchings, lithographs and paintings of fishermen and dockers in London, East Anglia and the industrial Midlands. Lowestoft Harbour (1951; London, AC England Col.), included in the Festival of Britain's 60 Paintings for '51 exhibition, shows figures depicted in a style derived from Cubism and displays Clough's primary and lasting preoccupation with the potential for abstraction in flatness of form. Later pictures such as Samples (1997; London, AC England Col.) describe colourful objects in shallow space with playful tonal gradations that suggest movement. Prunella Clough was the winner of the 1999 Jerwood Prize for painting.

Clough was fluid in her sexuality, enjoying close relationships with both men and women. Important figures in her life were nearly all artists and range from the cosmopolitan German Jew Heinz Henghes, to David Carr, scion of a wealthy Quaker family (his father was chairman of Peek Frean), to John Berger, the enamellist Robin Banks, Keith Vaughan and the film-maker Peter Adam. Friends included architects as well as painters, and Jim Cadbury-Brown commented of Clough that ‘she was always a difficult person to interpret’.

Making work
The well-known fact about Clough is that she kept the price of her art low. Once, when moving house, she turned the contents of her studio into a bonanza sale. "PRICES SLASHED!" announced the cards she sent out. For an artist, it was a pragmatic way of reducing the contents of her studio. But it was also a sly dig at the commodification of art.

Clough used stones, sometimes drawing on them directly and sometimes using transfer paper, treating the medium as experimental and exploring textures and tonal effects similar to those she was using in drawings, in which line and tone and rubbed textures like frottages were combined.