Patrick Caulfield

Patrick Caulfield (1936–2005) 

Patrick Caulfield was a painter closely associated with, but quite separate from, the Pop movement. He studied at the Royal College of Art and was a younger contemporary of David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Peter Phillips and Derek Boshier. He did not overtly purloin his subjects from the commonplace imagery of advertising and mass media, but belonged nevertheless to a generation of post-painterly artists who sought new ways to keep image-making alive. Much of his work is characterised by a benign, occasionally humorous sense of irony. In his characteristic mode he delineated objects with heavy black outlines and filled them with monochrome panels of flat colour. Studiously detached and technically refined, his pictures nevertheless seem to recommend and elevate their subjects. In his most sophisticated paintings such as After Lunch (1975, Tate), Caulfield juxtaposed this characteristic mode with discrete areas of finely naturalistic imagery.