Online publications

8 more interested in the details of adjacent fixtures and fittings that formed the context for her figures than in the individual women. This was, of course, true only as far as painting was concerned; socially she was gregarious and deeply engaged with people. She was attracted to material objects, to texture – which in her early years took priority over colour – and to a sometimes considerable degree of ambiguity. Objects – things – are the matter of her paintings and her primary subjects. At the same time, she transformed them: the Urban Object 1961 – a circle of metal and a glass skylight – is unidentifiable, though an enigmatic small object towards the top le of the canvas hints at a wider industrial setting. Places are subject to alteration: the character of an island is defined by an enormous shed across the width of the canvas, suggesting that it might even stretch from coast to coast (Shed on an Island, 1954). In Wapping, where Clough spent a good deal of time in the early 1950s, she was attracted by the innumerable cranes that filled the skyline and defined the area (Industrial River Landscape, c. 1953). Gripped as much by their mechanisms as by their immense height, she made a memorable group of paintings in which she paid close attention to the details of struts, joints, screws and levers. In the late 1940s Clough had made a well-known group of paintings and drawings depicting fishermen at Lowesto ; she had grown up in Southwold and retained a studio there for many years. Evidently she spent some time with her friend, David Carr, a fellow artist, watching a man painting a boat in Lowesto harbour; the result was Man Painting Funnel, c. 1953. It is an archetypal Clough image: the painter is anonymous, but he is also the fulcrum of the painting, which would be pointless were he not there. Yet despite her abiding attachment to East Anglia, Clough was essentially an urban person; she spent most of her life in London, living for many years in Fulham. Her Lorry Drivers are a discrete group, the urban equivalent of the fishermen. Both provided scope for copious attention to detail: the driver of Lorry with Ladder, 1, c.1952 is minimally sketched in, all the detail of the painting devoted to the complicated ladder roped to the roof of his cab. Other drivers read a newspaper or sleep, stare through the windscreen or engage closely with the business of transporting not-quite-identifiable loads. It seems that as with the women workers, it was the assemblages of ladders, pipes and miscellaneous metal objects that were Clough's real interest and the primary subjects of these paintings. Deserted Gravel Pit, 1946 is an early example of a type of landscape that had great appeal for her: flat, without people or vegetation, punctuated with random pools of water and occasional, anonymous objects; she returned to such an area many years later in a group of hauntingly enigmatic images. The 1946 painting shows the skeleton of an anonymous structure and, in the foreground, piled-up, unidentified debris of a kind to which she was frequently drawn. This was a category of worn-out, abandoned objects, le to rot or to pollute. It is tempting to ask whether she may have sensed them to be parallels to the human dispossessed who, soon a er the war's end, had spread across Europe. Later, Clough was to describe herself as predominantly a landscape painter; as travel became easier in the 1950s she took to making journeys around the country, discovering slag heaps, minesha s, new places and old churches. Always acutely aware of weather (she liked the flat, slightly grey light that allows the most accurate colour perceptions), she even painted some wonderfully dramatic sunsets, the paint thickly encrusted, as if to create an illusion of heat in pigment. Midland Landscape III, 1958 is unusual for the detail that it contains; more characteristic images are divided, like Industrial Landscape, c. 1956-8 into horizontal strata: a rudimentary sky, distance and an immense foreground. The static emptiness of this image is characteristic of Clough's landscapes; it allowed her to convert them into simulacra of objects as solid and tangible as her Gates. The very urban Landscape with Cable 1957, painted a year earlier, is closely Lorry with Ladder, 1, c. 1952, (p. 27)

• Cover