Out and About is an exhibition of seventeen paintings by the painter Prunella Clough (b.1919, London, d. 1999, London); included in the selection of work is Out and About (1993). Its typically oblique title offers a clue to Clough’s process of painting and highlights her claim to being “essentially an eye person”, constantly on the lookout for visual treasures. Keen-eyed and alert — a flaneuse and a magpie — Clough collected shapes, colours, textures, contradictions and incongruities; objects and images of all that was a part of everyday life. Throughout her life as an artist Clough made ‘field’ trips out...
Out and About is an exhibition of seventeen paintings by the painter Prunella Clough (b.1919, London, d. 1999, London); included in the selection of work is Out and About (1993). Its typically oblique title offers a clue to Clough’s process of painting and highlights her claim to being “essentially an eye person”, constantly on the lookout for visual treasures. Keen-eyed and alert — a flaneuse and a magpie — Clough collected shapes, colours, textures, contradictions and incongruities; objects and images of all that was a part of everyday life.
Throughout her life as an artist Clough made ‘field’ trips out beyond London, preferring the city’s edgelands and working coastal resorts where industry and nature become tangled, to a picturesque landscape or rural idyll. What she gathered from such outings was noted in her journals and diaries, jotted on scraps of paper, on backs of envelopes and recounted in letters to friends. In small, neat handwriting she recalled objects and shapes in colour and texture: “…a brown man on a white towel on neutral sand by pale green posts by a white boat…”
Avoiding being either abstract or figurative, Prunella Clough’s paintings have their own intrinsic logic and independent existence; possessed with a precarious beauty tempered by edgy delinquency. They are layered with the gritty textures of an urban existence and drawn with lines caught in an entanglement with nature; ingredients Clough has detached, reformed and transported from the journeys she made so regularly, out and about in the world.
