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…”
With her “not very glamorous” camera, Clough took what she called “rough photographs”. These are extraordinary snapshots of shop window displays, drapery and awnings, brightly coloured plastic bowls, buckets and spades, factory gates, chimneys, gutters and kerb stones, floral tributes and grave-side ornaments, wire baskets piled with footballs. And more.
Carefully edited by Clough before she died, and held at Tate Britain, her archive is a trove of ideas and experiments, documenting her astute, witty and sometimes wry observations. Categorised boxes of photographs, diaries, notebooks, letters (personal and professional) span much of her life. Student notebooks reveal her rigorous study of materials and techniques while appointment diaries tell of the exhibitions she visited and the artists she dined with.
Other boxes contain remnants of studio apparatus: abstract shapes salvaged from ‘failed’ canvases, cardboard cut-outs used as stencils or templates, home-made colour swatch books, experimental collages on surplus post cards, novelty wrappers, dried twigs, a fragment of stone. What might appear to be left-behind odds and ends are in fact thrilling, a telling story of thinking and making. The stuff in her archive is evidence that Clough collected and recorded much that caught her eye. It shows too that she had laid down substantial footings to support the freedom and strangeness she desired for her paintings — but it only partially reveals the source of Clough’s distinctive visual language. There was so much else that she observed; things fleetingly glimpsed, unrecordable visual impressions that burned into the soul and got stored at the back of her mind. The written notes, simply drawn sketches, snapshot photos were for Clough an aide-memoire; not to be used directly in her paintings but as a lexicon of shapes, motifs and visual signs to be called upon when plotting her canvases.
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.
