Bio

Prue Pardue has lived the artist's life, working professionally in the fields of design and illustration as well as studying and teaching painting and drawing.

She first studied at the Oxford School of Art and was later invited to study at the Royal Academy.

After leaving the Royal Academy Schools, Prue was employed as a textile designer by Manchester Studios designing patterns for dress and furnishing fabrics with gouache. When living in New York, she was employed by Cohn Hall Marx as a textile designer in brush and inks. At the same time she was designing off-Broadway theatre sets, book covers and magazine illustrations.

On her return to Oxford, she studied early 20th century art with Robin Child while herself lecturing on life drawing and composition at the Cherwell College.

In Oxford, Prue formed the painting group C21, which exhibits locally and at The Gallery, Cork Street. During this time she has also exhibited as an individual at the Royal Academy, The Mall Galleries and MOMA in Oxford. She has also been employed to restore frescoes in the Oxford University's venerable Bodleian library and illustrated for the Pergamon Press.

Early years

Prue Pardue has fond memories of her first teacher at the Oxford Art School, where she began her studies at the age of 17. That teacher was renowned war artist Evelyn Dunbar (1906-60), who was one of the few women artists to have been employed by the War Artists' Advisory Committee.

At the Oxford Art School, Evelyn Dunbar taught painting and composition. She encouraged a kind of compositional "painting of shapes", reminiscent of Piero della Francesca, using a combination of geometry and sensitive drawing. As a young student, Prue remembers being “so impressed by the golden section” employed in Piero’s painting of John the Baptist in the National Gallery London.

Prue recalls Dunbar taking the students around the paintings in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford specifically to show them a painting of a cow in Piero di Cosimo’s The Forest Fire. “The cow had a shape and not just an ordinary profile or full face but a more triangular shape that a cow makes at that angle... She pointed me right from the beginning in a certain direction. 'Look at the patterns,' she would say.”

Drawing at the Royal Accademy

After the Oxford Art School, Prue was invited to study as a postgraduate at the Royal Academy.

At the RA, Prue recalls that students were very much left to their own devices. “There was not really that much tuition in at the RA. Most of my tuition had come from Oxford. I was really only taught how to draw in three dimensions as was the traditional education in academic drawing. I did not really get much more of an education in ‘painting’ from that point on.”

“3D drawing in the renaissance style, that’s what you learned – not copying the shadows you saw but using shading to round the form, taking a form slowly shading it as it turns away from the light. It was pretty much how things were done until it was abandoned by Cezanne.”

Prue Pardue 20th century painter

As Bonnard once said: "Drawing is instinctive but painting is knowledge." Prue’s development as a painter has been a journey of acquiring knowledge.

After the Royal Academy, Prue studied and practiced painting with Robin Child. This involved a practical analysis of 20th century painters with a particular interest in the use of light and colour.

Prue’s journey as a 20th century modern painter very much began with Robin's lectures.

The formal values found in painters like Cezanne, Bonnard and Monet all became a part of this creative arc. For Prue, composition is of more importance than the subject matter – just as it is with Giorgio Morandi and Ben Nicholson. The sensitivity of Gwen John’s tone and line, the design of Nicolas de Staël and the relationship of blocks of tone and colour found in the work of Keith Vaughan and Bernard Cathelin.

These are just some of the painters that have inspired and connected with Prue’s work.