Shed on an Island, 1954
Oil on Canvas
Signed bottom right
Signed verso

Austin Desmond, Jan 2000
Illustrated : Aspects Of Modern British Art Nov -Dec c1999 page 43.
Whitechapel Gallery Exhibition, 1960, #49.

Rural and urban themes are synthesised in a clear landscape that is dominated less by pastoral detail than by horizontal and vertical compositional structures.The dry, chalky palette is characteristically Cloughian and the foreground stakes, wheels, boulders and what have you ,identify marine or quarrying machinery. The precise topographical location - Portland Bill, St.Austell china clay country or an Aegean island perhaps - is left deliberately unidentified for, as Margaret Garlake has with Clough’s ‘intensely human but non-literal realism...is concerned with ephemera and transience rather than with districts and buildings’*1

Clough, on the rare occasion she did make revealing artist statements, hit the mark
when confessing to a preference for saying “a small thing rather edgily” This Chelsea and Camberwell trained artist was demonstrably influenced by Tapies and Burri. Her supreme sense of placement and mise-en-scene also surely owed something to her war career, when she worked on charts and maps or on magazine layout for the Office of War Information
*1 Margaret Garlake ,Burlington Magazine, October 1999
47.6 x 38.7 cm (18¾ x 15¼ inches)
POA