Nancy Clifton

Nancy Clifton ( 1907 - 1989) was an Australian artist 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).
Nancy Clifton
Nancy Clifton was born Nancy Dobson in Brunswick, Melbourne on 27 July, 1907. As an only child she spent much 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 short-lived Morning Post illustrating women’s and children’s fashions, but the Depression caused the paper to close down. One of her colleagues there was a young cartoonist Alex Gurney. 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 Lindsay Bernard Hall drawing from life and from plaster casts, but she found it very academic.
In 1936 at the age of 28 she married Allan 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 visited galleries and became interested in modern art . Then she taught art history and art in Ivanhoe Girls Grammar from 1951 until she retired in 1971. 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 called Melbourne Prints (5). 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. The National Gallery of Australia acquired thirty 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 had her first one-woman show of watercolours at Gallery 99 in 1968. Patrick McCaughey, the art critic for The Age (a Melbourne newspaper) gave her work a highly positive review referring to “a floating lyricism, distinctive and genuine”(6). 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” . These collages 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 reception valuation==
Nancy Clifton’s works were praised for their intensity of feeling and mastery of technique whether it be in her stark black and white prints or her watercolours and collages. (1) (6))
==Awards==
1966 1st Prize - Maitland Prize for Watercolour
1970 1st Prize -Maitland Prize for Watercolour
==Selected group exhibitions==
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
1967 Royal South Australian Society of Arts, Maude Vizard-Wholohan Art Prize exhibition
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 Arts. 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
==Selected solo exhibitions:==
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
==Bibliography==
McCulloch, Susan. The New McCulloch’s Encyclopaedia of Australian Art, 4th edition 2006, The Miegunyah press, Carlton Victoria, p.328 ISBN 052285317 X
Germaine, Max. A Dictionary of Women Artists of Australia, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1991 p.82 ISBN 9768097132
Germaine, Max. Artists and Galleries of Australia, volumes 1 and 2, 3rd edition Craftsman press, Sydney 1990, p125
ISBN 9768097027
Campbell, Jean. Australian Watercolour Painters 1780 to the Present Day, Craftsman House, Sydney 1989, p.296
ISBN 0947131280
Australian Prints and Printmaking database listing printmaking artists in the print collection of the National Gallery of Australia. https://www.printsandprintmaking.gov.au/artists/5270/works 
National Gallery of Victoria print collection https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au
Adams, Tate. Melbourne Printmaking in the 1960’s, paper presented at the second Australian Print Symposium NGA Canberra 1992 
Category:1907 births
Category:1989 deaths
Category:Australian artists
Category:Australian people