Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/488332
9 comparable in this respect; detailed but entirely without narrative, it is animated solely by a discreet blue semicircle in the foreground. A decade later, when Clough's palette had brightened considerably, she painted Untitled, 1966 which hints at many of the attributes of landscape without stating them. This is a type of image o en described as 'abstract', though it surely refers to a physically situated visual experience. Nevertheless, Clough was certainly interested in abstrac- tion in the 1960s, as were many inventive painters, though she was adamant in her statement: 'I have never painted an abstract painting in my life'. 5 Garden, 1964 is characteristic of her not-quite abstract images, its greenish-brown col- ours and watery implications confirmed by a title chosen, no doubt, a er completion. Her palette became more varied in the 1960s when she recorded her admiration for Robyn Denny's rich, deep reds that, like her own Untitled, 1966, seem to have a physical depth that extends far back beyond the canvas. We see other technical experiments at this time: Untitled 2, 1967 is, perhaps, a painting about light, diffused in films of pale colour that are offset by the brilliant vertical stripes – on curtains, we might surmise. On a very different note, Double Diamond, 1973 is an exploration of the spatial qualities imparted, or implied, by the solid body of the black diamond and its incorporeal, outlined double. This painting incidentally carries a warning against taking titles too seriously: Clough appropriated the phrase, as a joke, at a time when it was an instant reference to a widely advertised brand of beer. Wire and Rods, 1979 is a char- acteristically indefinable but intensely beguiling image, with its hints of electrical installations – and a certain musical quality – rendered live by flecks of yellow paint. Grid, 1973, Mesh 3, 1981 and Broken Vane, 1994 are further examples of Clough's almost-abstraction, a position that allowed her to explore the construction of indeterminate space defined by light. It is, perhaps, the most singular achievement of her later paintings. The equally ambiguous canvases that are the Gate paintings form a compelling and diverse group that lies between landscape and still-life, a long and varied series of variations on the theme of gates. They cover a range from simple devices for closing off a field to the heavy metal structures that secure factories. Some are perhaps symbolic; of others, like Small Gate 4, 1980, we see only a fragment, set against a horizon line, the light behind it suffusing an undescribed landscape. This painting and others that combine a still-life aesthetic in perfect balance with landscape are predominantly concerned with light and colour, rather than function. It is easy to become accustomed to the subtlety of Clough's use of colour and to overlook its transformatory role in her work. From time to time she would demonstrate the ability of a tiny area of pigment to dominate an image. The two canvases called Barrels in a Yard, c. 1954 and 1955, are both animated by a single small patch of intense colour: respectively green and yellow, without which they would be distinctly drab. With Trellis, 1991, she exploited the possibilities of a contre-jour effect in a painting entirely about coloured light. It is possible to overlook the radicalism of Clough's work though it is to be found precisely in her appropriation of the traditional genres of landscape and still-life. She was able to express landscape in the fundamental terms of foreground, sky and horizon, with all other information implicit in carefully judged points of colour. She extended still-life even further, stripping it of any connection with its traditional content of consumption, preferring to present it in connection with the human presence that animates all her work, even in its absence. Humanity, we might conclude, is the subject that embodies all her objects. Wire and Rods, 1979, (p. 55) 1. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Over- looked. Four Essays on Still Life Painting, London: Reaktion Books, 1990, pp. 13 & 61. 2. Ibid., p. 87. 3. Frances Spalding, Prunella Clough, Regions Unmapped, London: Lund Humphries, 2012, p. 50. 4. Ibid., p. 92. 5. Ibid., p. 189.