Sunset in Mining Area, 1959
Oil on Canvas
Signed on verso


The stark contrast between sullen, almost black terrain in the bottom half of the picture and the luminous light grey sky above posits an almost minimal flag-like design allieviated only by a speckled gold and crimson oval on the medial horizon . This picture, formerly owned by the sculptor, painter and writer Michael Ayrton, with whom Clough fraternised after her post-war Camberwell student years, is all about archeological landscape as repository of past or present human and industrial activity. The palette, like nature itself, makes no concession to ‘sweet’ or seductive colour and ensures, as Garlake has written, “the toughness of her images of urban decay, banishing any possibility of nostalgia.” Although the statement is accurately symptomatic of a developing abstraction of texture and motif and leading to her mature formalism, Clough did associate during the 1950’s with Ayrtons’s neo-romantic colleagues like Keith Vaughan ,John Craxton and John Minton. Appropriate to this social and indeed artistic milieu the subject of ‘Sunset in Mining Area’ thereby retained a sublime sense of poetry.
41.0 x 51.0 cm (16¼ x 20 inches)

Provenance:
Michael & Elizabeth Ayrton
The Fine Art Society, London
Private Collection

Exhibition History:
Prunella Clough: A Retrospective Exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Sept-Oct 1960. Cat No 128
POA