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Nancy Clifton, Australian artist
Nancy Clifton ( 1907 - 1989) was an Australian artist who was known for her printmaking, painting and mixed media works on paper. Her works were praised for their technical know-how combined with intensity of feeling (Alan Warren The Sun Melbourne Sept, 1968).
Life, training and influences
[edit]Nancy Clifton was born Nancy Dobson in Brunswick, Melbourne on 27 July, 1907. As an only child she spent a lot of her childhood reading and drawing, and her father, although he did not believe in education for women, encouraged her to go to art school. She attended the Leyshon White Commercial Art School for three years and trained in fashion drawing, lettering, copying ads and signage. Her fellow pupils included Rex Battarbee, James Flett, Nutter Buzacott and Beryl Hartland who was to become Britain’s top fashion artist. In 1927 at the age of 20 she started working on the women’s page of the Morning Post illustrating women’s and children’s fashions, but the Depression caused the paper to close down. She then took every job possible to make a living, drawing blue-prints for architects, copying display units in stores for catalogues, doing fashion drawings, and designing theatre sets and costumes for amateur theatricals. At the same time she took night classes at the National Gallery art school where she studied under W.B McInnes and Bernard Hall drawing from life and from plaster casts, but she found it very academic.
In 1936 at the age of 28 she married Allen Clifton and had three children, a son and two daughters, in the following four years. Then, in 1942 when the war broke out and her husband went into the army (recruited by the Australian government for his knowledge of Japanese) she moved with her three small children to Birregurra, a small town in the Western District of Victoria where her parents-in-law lived. Living conditions there were very hard, with no electricity or running water, and she was alone, chopping wood, carrying water from the pump, and living with no amenities and no help. As a result she was unable to paint, and was cut off from all cultural life, except reading.
In 1948 she returned to Melbourne and resumed family life with her husband. She taught art history and art in Ivanhoe Girls Grammar from 1951 until she retired in 1971 and she was an inspirational teacher. At the same time she resumed her own art work. She became interested in print-making and in the late 1950’s took classes in lithography, etching and wood-cuts at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, now RMIT University. There she met and worked with well-known artists who used the printing presses for their own work. Among them was Fred Williams whom she befriended and admired greatly. That group of artists went on to form the first Australian print group. They held their first exhibition in 1958, and she exhibited with them for three years, receiving good reviews for her work. During this period she produced many powerful black and white wood-cuts and lino cuts, influenced by artists such as Kathe Kollwitz and the German Expressionists. They are figurative, mainly portraits of people she saw around her in the city - old migrant women, women with children, lonely old men, young athletes and members of her own family. They are extremely strong, and often moving (?). The National Gallery of Australia acquired a considerable number (23) of them. Her output was small, but enough to exhibit each year.
In 1963 she made her first trip abroad and travelled to Italy, Paris, Madrid and London, visiting the major museums and seeing the originals of all the great works she knew so well from reproductions only. In London she was particularly impressed by Turner’s late watercolours and also those by Emil Nolde, and on her return to Australia she began to paint in that medium, fascinated by the transparency of pure colour and the way it overlapped. She abandoned figures and drawing and her watercolours became entirely abstract representations of the essence of the Australian landscape, its light, contours, colours and strange beauty. She won the Maitland watercolour prize twice, in 1966 and 1970.
In later years she turned to mixed media paintings or collages, combining the abstraction of her watercolours with the “realism” of added elements such as newspaper cuttings, labels, handwriting, people’s names, photos and tissue paper. She explained them as “a need to comment on the time I live in”, and also “remnants from the past” (references?). They are extremely complex, in vibrant colours, and many of them are deeply personal, intended for a child, grandchild or friend.
Over the years she took part in a number of exhibitions, sometimes with other artists, in particular with a group of women who met every Tuesday (Mary MacQueen, Barbara Brash, Lesbia Thorpe and Nancy Clifton), and one-woman shows, the last of which was in 1984 at Niagara Galleries in Melbourne. She died in Melbourne on January 21 1989 at the age of 81.
Like many women artists of her generation she found it very difficult to reconcile work, teaching, raising a family and finding time to practise her art, which is why her major work was produced between 1958 and 1985. She once said that she envied male artists who could devote their whole life to their art because they had wives!
Style and works
[edit]Nancy Clifton’s works were praised for their intensity of feeling, whether it be her stark black and white prints or her watercolours which art critic Patrick McCaughey called in his review of her 1968 show, “A floating lyricism, distinctive and genuine” and a “clear and delicate sensitivity”. The Age Melbourne. (12th September 1968).
Accomplishments
[edit]Awards
[edit]- 1966 1st Prize - Maitland Prize for Watercolour
- 1970 1st Prize -Maitland Prize for Watercolour
Selected group exhibitions
[edit]- 1958 “The Melbourne Graphic artists”, Australian Gallery, Melbourne
- 1960 “Melbourne Prints”, Johnstone Gallery
- 1961 Painting, Drawing and Sculpture, Victorian Artists’ Society
- 1962 Melbourne Prints, Argus Gallery, Melbourne
- 1962 Melbourne printmakers , Gallery A, Melbourne
- 1963 Philadelphia Print Club, Philadelphia U.S.A.
- 1966 Maitland prize for Watercolour: First prize
- 1968 Contemporary Art Society of Australia, Argus Gallery, Victoria
- 1969 (Third) Andrew Fairly Art Prize, Shepparton Art Gallery
- 1970 Maitland prize for Watercolour: First prize
- 1971 Contemporary Graphic Art, Athenaeum, Melbourne
- 1974 Australian Watercolour Institute, Blaxland Gallery, Sydney, N.S.W
- 1976 Australian Watercolour Institute, Sydney
- 1976 F.E. Richardson Watercolour Purchase, Geelong Art Gallery
- 1977 National Gallery of Victoria, Relief Prints from collection: Woodcuts and lino cuts 19th to 20th century
- 1978 Group exhibition watercolours, Clive Parry Galleries, Beaumaris, Victoria
- 1980 Mornington Prints, Women’s Art Exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
- 2006 From Tuesday to Tuesday: prints by Nancy Clifton, Mary MacQueen, Barbara Brash and Lesbia Thorpe Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
Solo exhibitions
[edit]- 1968 Gallery 99, Melbourne, Watercolours
- 1974 Flinders Gallery, Geelong, Watercolours
- 1975 Europa Gallery, Melbourne
- 1975 The Excelsior Hotel, Hong Kong
- 1978 Gallery de Tastes, Melbourne, Watercolours
- 1981 Niagara Galleries, Melbourne. Prints, Collages
- 1984 Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, Watercolours