Phoebe Unwin

Information, 2010

Oil on canvas (75.5 × 60 cm)

Image: Wilkinson Gallery

Phoebe Unwin's work always puts a smile on my face because each jewel like painting takes me on a surprising, quirky ride. Like a modern day Prunella Clough, Unwin's paintings capture the abstract in the everyday. Each painting feels like an experiment in paint; blurry, hard edge, washy, stringy, gluggy - confidently applied and sometimes deliciously awkward too. And the kicker, for me, is that each one emerges as an individual in it's own right. I admire a painter who is not afraid to change direction with each new canvas. Phoebe Unwin has a new show at Wilkinson Gallery in London and I really wish I could be there to have a look. For further reading HERE'S a good article.

Phillip Allen

Phillip Allen,

Between the Soup and the Cheese - version 5,

2009, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

Phillip Allen is a British born painter best known for his unique brand of abstraction incorporating modernist design motifs and contemporary painterly conventions. In a current exhibition at Transition Gallery in London, Allen, alongside Rose Wiley and Jake Clark, is showing a new set of works that represent a stylistic departure from his earlier paintings. Allen chooses an all-over treatment of the canvas yet, like his past work, still explores the delicacies of paint and their relationship to surface. In some of the works a full or partial narrow frame anchors the geometric forms nicely - an interesting and effective evolution from the two deliciously thick icing-like bands typically featured in former paintings. When I first saw these new works I really sat up and took notice because, to be honest, they just make the whole process of painting (arduous layering, gruelling removal, infuriating re laying etc etc) look so easy. Can you tell I'm a little frustrated right now? Seriously...this painter has all the tools and the nuanced visual language to make a beautifully rendered abstract painting. It is also, from what I can glean from my internet research, a style that is quintessentially British (a Prunella Clough legacy, perhaps? without forgetting a Nozkowskiesque nod to the small format, of course) and I'm very much enamoured of what is being made in that part of the world right now like this, and these.

prunella clough

Prunella Clough
False Flower 1993

Oil on canvas

Speaking of Nozkowski, Prunella Clough (1919-1999) seemed the obvious choice for this post. Somewhere in cyber space I read of a similarity between these two and so knowing nothing about Clough I decided to investigate.

Then I bought a book of her work...and another.

Clough stands out as a painter of integrity and original vision. She chose to steer clear of the art world scene, instead dedicating time to her art as a 'practice' rather than to her art as a 'career'. In the 1950s she emerged as a social realist and then in the 60s she became more painterly and developed a personal abstract style that I never tire of looking at.

Two aspects of her working methods attract me. Her use of language to note colours and textures for future paintings are worth perusing and I think are just as intriguing as her final works. Then there are her reference photos of objects in situ, exploring colours and textures of random things - sort of like environmental still lives with an urban focus. Never used as direct references for paintings they do, however, inform us of her unique visual curiosity. Like a Nozkowski, a Clough is a sensory delight.