James Clifford

Who was James Clifford?

James Clifford was an Australian Modernist painter.

James Clifford was born in Muswellbrook in 1936 and in the sixties moved to Sydney where he studied with Desiderius Orban and exhibited at Watters Gallery. He worked in various styles and became distinctive early on, combining Hard-edge painting with landscape and seascape painting in kaleidoscopic perspectives, tropical landscapes, Art Nouveau borders and surreal elements, later incorporating collage, occasionally text art, Decalcomania and figuration reminiscent of Ed Paschke, Andy Warhol and David Hockney. Clifford was openly same sex attracted however he did not identify as gay. His paintings of the human figure were usually male homoerotic nudes. His late paintings were Lyrical abstraction and have been compared to Ralph Balson's matter paintings of the early 1960s.

The novelist Patrick White, famously associated with painters Ian Fairweather, Sidney Nolan, Brett Whiteley and Chris O'Doherty, was collecting Clifford's work from the mid sixties until the mid eighties. Both Clifford and White had family connections in the Hunter Region of New South Wales.