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PRUNELLA CLOUGH (1919-1999)
Scrap in a Yard, 1957
Oil on canvas
Signed lower left
81.2 x 71cm
Prov: The New Art Centre, London
Leslie Edwards
Exh: Prunella Clough: A Retrospective
Exhibition, 1960,
no.79, Whitechapel Art Gallery
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'I started to become a pop artist from my interest in
English folk art. Especially my interest in the visual
art of the fairground and barge painting too. It all originated
while I was still a student at the Royal College. Now
I want to recapture and bring to life again something
of this old-time popular art. For instance, I'm working
at the moment on a small picture of a boxer called Kid
McCoy. He was fighting around 1910. I read all the boxing
and wrestling magazines, by the way. So that this picture
will have an authentic old-time feel about it. I'm making
the wooden surface look old. I feel that if I bore artificial
woodworm holes into it, it will acquire the quality of
age. This is essential to my purpose. For me, pop art
is often rooted in nostalgia; the nostalgia of old popular
things. And although I'm also continually trying to establish
a new pop art, one which stems directly from our own time,
I'm always looking back at the sources of the idiom and
trying to find the technical forms that will best recapture
the authentic feel of folk pop…'.
Peter Blake, Pop Art for Admass, The Studio, July 1963
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