Social Realism and "Urbscapes", Prunella Clough and Carol Rhodes

Social Realism

Prunella Clough (1919 – 1999) Painter and printmaker

 Prunella Clough had an acute sense of place and time. In her book, Prunella Clough: Regions Unmapped (2012), Frances Spalding charts Clough’s career. During the 1950s Clough concentrated on men at work in manual roles, reflecting the post-war industrial recovery and has been associated with the movement known as “social realism”. She focussed on the industrial landscape, scrap and then the post-industrial decline. She liked to say small things “edgily”. Clough was not only a painter, but also a proficient print maker, and worked with collage and “found” objects, sometimes from memory. Her working methods have been preserved in the Tate archives.

Her subject matter was often things that otherwise would have been overlooked. She liked the dilapidated and the scruffy and called her views of industrial and barren land “urbscapes”.

 Some typical examples are illustrated below, which conjure up images of walks on grey days by derelict, abandoned industrial buildings and canals.

Her concept of approaching insignificant things as suitable subject matter relates to my topic. It is often such items which denote the character of a place and give it individuality and character.

 

Prunella Clough, Cooling Tower II, 1958, oil on canvas, Tate Collection

Prunella Clough, By the Canal, 1976, oil on canvas, with cellulose wadding, Tate Collection

Prunella Clough, Corrugated Fence, c. 1955, Intaglio print on paper, Hargeaves and Ball Trust

Modern “Urbscapes”

Carol Rhodes (1959 -2018)

A more recent, innovative approach, with similar themes to those of Clough, was taken up by Carol Rhodes. Rhodes spent much of her childhood in Bengal and was influenced by that experience and the dislocation she suffered when relocated to the UK. She painted on small, square, meticulously primed MDF panels, which allowed her to achieve fastidious brushwork, rather like Wyeth’s.

Her subject matter takes on an aerial viewpoint of unpopulated landscapes, quite often with no horizon line. She focussed on a very particular type of view involving industrial estates, commercial depots, airports, urban car parks, quarries, reservoirs, and airports.

“They are places where the man-made meets the untamed landscape. Her paintings speak of man’s desire to govern the land: to flatten it and regiment it, to take stuff from it, store stuff on it, and dump stuff in it. They are landscapes that are made by us, for us, and they are, in every sense, about us.

 

(Elliot, The Scotsman, 8 December, 2018)

These sentiments echo Sharma’s arguments about Man’s intrusion into the landscape. Carpark, Canal, 1994, below, is typical of her work, as stated by the National Galleries of Scotland website, Rhodes “has created a body of work unique in contemporary painting”. Her work is a good illustration of an inventive viewpoint, together with unusual and distinctive working methods.