Online publications

14 inspired pictorial motifs, profiles and curious outlines. In the mid 1980s Prunella turned up one evening at the flat of John Ball and Gordon Hargreaves and marched into their kitchen with a small painting called Industrial Landscape (c.1960). She placed it on a shelf, next to their old- fashioned gas grill, declaring that it should live there. When they protested, pointing out it would get splashed, covered in fat and be exposed to their steaming kettle, she replied 'Exactly – it will go on cooking nicely!' 12 Despite receiving a traditional training from Ceri Richards, Victor Pasmore and Henry Moore, Prunella worked eccentrically, with inspiration coming from surprising quarters. She hated limiting herself to one medium and employed a wide range of materials, processes and techniques, sometimes simultaneously in a single work; it all depended what the image required or dictated. She was always thri y, to say the least, and even made a series of pictures incorporating her used typewriter ribbons. Her processes were o en long, drawn-out affairs since she mistrusted paintings that resolved themselves too readily. Frequently she destroyed them if she felt they weren't functioning satisfactorily; she would burn them or cut them up and cannibalise them into new pieces. She said: I am trying to reach beyond the mere manufacture of a painting the getting-it-all-together, and this entails time. Paintings are made slowly because I work slowly on many things at once. 13 Prunella was concerned that her paintings were not 'tough' enough and worried that they were over elegant and too tidy. She fretted that her style was chameleon-like, changing from canvas to canvas. She liked to have several paintings on the go at once, in her endeavour to create a more homogenous style. 'Time is part of the factor of change,' she said, preferring her paintings to 'gestate, ferment and cook.' 14 She told Bryan Robertson: I am not interested in technicalities for their own sake. I prefer oil paint because I find it more easy than acrylic to change during the progress of the painting which usually takes a long time. Hence, o en, their beat-up look. There are some pretty scraggy surfaces around. Every now and then I will pick up another kind of material to work on as a relief from canvas. It is interesting to play around with neutral, machine-made surfaces as opposed to built-in connotations of the stretched canvas. 15 Nevertheless she had her characteristic pictorial habits. For example, in her earlier pictures she relished playing off 'abstract' textures (denoting, perhaps, piles of wire or scrap), against figurative shapes. 16 Later, a form might be enclosed in a contrasting hue to lend it greater pictorial value. A dab of colour might be employed to 'sing out' from the surface of the picture – perhaps an acidic disc of lemon 17 or a subtle blue square, to set alight a monochromatic composition. Prunella was an accomplished teacher and taught at Chelsea and Wimbledon Schools of Art. Her dislike of institutional politics meant she shied away from positions of responsibility and hierarchy. We discussed art education o en since I was teaching History of Art. She explained to me that, Teaching keeps you on your toes. It's not that you want the students to do what you do or adopt your solutions to their problems, but you have to help them work out their own way of progressing. 18 In a very direct manner she would interrogate her students and ask: 'Why did you put that there?' Now come on, explain to me why.' She wanted them to consider alternative solutions while discussing the importance of 'redundant space', 'appropriate intervals between forms' and the 'distribution of objects' within the frame. The expression 'pictorial incident' 19 was a catchphrase she used while striving for the effective placement of objects. She always claimed that students taught her more than she taught them. As a printmaker, Prunella was inventive and resourceful, able to work alone on experimental images or alongside a print technician. Graham Sutherland had given her advice on drypoint, etching and

• Cover