Her earlier paintings such as Lorry with a Cable Drum have a drawn quality and I'm very taken by her etchings. Her use of figures is interesting, when she included them they physically dominated the paintings but somehow you feel that the paintings weren't about them and that they are somehow incidental to the composition.
Broken Bottle caught my eye as the way it is laid out it looks as though the bottle has been laid to rest.
It has been commented that her later more abstract paintings are rooted in reality and it is easy to understand how they evolved from her earlier work which was an abstraction of what she saw. (Maybe all drawing and painting is to a greater or lesser extent abstraction of the original source.)
I love her 1993 Back Drop for it's use of colour and the way the paint suggests the fall of the curtain but this doesn't seem to be typical of her later work.
I've found that pictures look very different in the flesh so I went to the Tate Britain which seems to be the only place nearby that has her paintings on display. First, Man Hosing Metal Fish Boxes from 1951. It's a lot darker than I expected and that makes it difficult to see the lines that make up the folds of the figure's clothing. The lines are very important, although the face is stylised it has a definite expression which was difficult to capture when I sketched the picture.
(2 months later the character came to me, it's Larry the Lamb (or more specifically the mayor) from Toytown There's not much on the internet apart from this book cover and this album cover)
The jet of water looks better in real life than it does in scans or photos
The background is an integral part of the figure and the scene. They clearly evolved together. There are lots of background details which might seem unnecessary but give a clearer picture of the world that the figure comes from.
The Tate also displays Wire and Demolition from 1982 which is very different.
It's much bigger than I expected, quite a complex picture. Although your eye is drawn to the black tangle of what I guess are wires there is a lot going on in the background. The brown and beige paint has been splattered and dragged around on the canvas. It looks like the remnants of a dry stone wall though I can see faces and outlines of figures in the lines which may say more about me than it does about Prunella Clough. I think the painting could work very well without the blocks of bright colour, orange turquoise and pink. They manage to look very much part of the painting even though they are very different to the rest of it. There is an area of pink and white paint at the lower left hand area in a sort of starburst shape, was this used to balance the blocks of bright colour? You don't see this area unless you look closely. Maybe there is some pink in the beige of the whole background. The shapes defined by the black wires are clearly defined but complex, this is a picture that you could look at again and again and still find new elements.
I followed the visit by going to the Lumiere festival, highlights included the Keyframes - Groupe LAPS/Thomas Veyssiiere (I have a short video but I can't get it to play when I upload it) also Les Lumineoles by Porte par le vent
We didn't manage to see everything but we lasted till 10.15 when it started to snow. It was a brilliant evening which brought hundreds of happy people onto the streets of London on a very cold evening, I hope it, or similar events happen in the future, it can only be good for art and for London
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