Disused Land

Prunella Clough, Disused Land, 1999This week we went down to Chichester to see the Pallant House exhibition British Landscapes: A Sense of Place. The Prunella Clough painting above was one of the highlights, inspired by edgelands in the Portsmouth area and painted in 1999, just before her death. In the catalogue, written by Pallant Director Simon Martin, she is quoted as saying how difficult it was to paint such places, that really require something 'tougher and more brutal in terms of pictorial response than I can give it'. There is also an evocative quote about Clough's paintings written back in 1953: 'She looks out on an industrial city - its greased axles, its riveted plates, its plane boars, its cables, ladders and tarpaulins, its rust, its crude protective paints, the condensation of its atmosphere - allows the very fabric of it to press in upon her imagination, and then tries to find, in terms of paint, the equivalent of its imprint.' This was John Berger, writing of the New…