Following his abrupt departure from Russia in 1971 where he had been permission to leave in order to attend the funeral of his English wife, Prokofiev was able to find a position as Gregory fellow of art at the University of Leeds. Here he continued the tendency towards using more and more pale pigments and to extend his reductive treatment of architecture into a abstraction.  These paintings have more concern for structure and space and came to be known as the 'white'paintings. The canvases are larger and the images, based on buildings and with an architectonic quality, are more abstract and geometric until they present as passages of thick impasto, white on white, with very minimal reference to arches and towers.  Around 1974 a parallel body of work deleloped which were more lyrical and expressive.