Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works

Charles Clough
American (b. 1951)
N.F., N.D. (1980)
collage, oil enamel on paper
46" x 29" each

STYLE: abstract expressionism
neoexpressionism

 ©Charles Clough

According to Charles Clough, one of the things his paintings express is "the magic and beauty of a stroke made in a moment and all that corny stuff." (unpublished interview with Elizabeth Licata, 2/93)

Charles Clough was born in Buffalo, New York in 1951. He experimented with illustration and graphics as a teenager, but, as he states now, he first thought that "art was some kind of publicity thing you read about in Life magazine." After briefly studying graphic art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Clough attended the Royal Ontario College of Art in Toronto in 1970 - 71. Soon afterwards, he met the artist Robert Longo who, like Clough, had a studio space at the Ashford Hollow Foundation in Buffalo. Clough and Longo discussed the possibility of founding an artist-run presentation space. With the help of Ashford Hollow and many individual artists and administrators, Clough and Longo founded Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in 1974. Hallwalls grew to become an internationally-known center for performance, media, and the visual arts.

Clough left Buffalo in 1978 for New York to focus on his own career as an artist. At this time he was working mainly in collage and appropriation, finger-painting on color magazine reproduction and then using further photography, collage, and painting to build up layers of imagery. These works were well-received, particularly given the movement toward appropriation and questioning of media imagery that was popular at the time.

Clough also works directly with paint on canvas, using abstract imagery and a painting tool he calls "the big finger." He feels that this device brings a certain emotional distance to the physical act of painting. Clough still uses the "big fingers," but often resorts to other tools, including photography, continuing to explore an intellectual approach to the creation of imagery.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Charlotta Kotik, Charles Clough, Albright-Knox Art Gallery catalogue, 5/83
"It would be hard not to see the allusions to Abstract Expressionism in the painted gestures in Clough's work. However, close scrutiny reveals that these too are illusionary since what we see is, in fact, the impeccable flatness of a mechanically reproduced surface. The two elements have equal importance—the results for which Clough is striving depend on this interaction of gestures and impersonal reproduction."

Anthony Bannon, Buffalo News, 3/15/83
"Clough's process begins with mechanical reproductions of his own work, which are cut and pasted, assembled, marked over, drawn over, re-photographed, reassembled, drawn over, painted over, projected, imitated, made into books and so on...Finally, the work says something about the process, which is decidedly modern—a reclaiming process that is capable of replication, like modern media it claims its kin across channels—original works of art made into prints in books, frames in films, stills in photographs, scans across television, et cetera...by seizing the past of art and making it present, Clough creates new unities, swimming across time and merging old spaces into new ones...The idea of swirling is the grammar upon which the pieces are built..His all-over compulsion to fill a confining frame yields a bit at the edges—just enough to breathe with the work—"

Alan Jones, Pecolo catalogue, 1985
"'As spontaneous as my work looks, it is all about development of the image.' Clough is clear about his motives: the quest for the lucky accident..'to reach that magical moment when you become so involved in the work—the sheer joy of making—that you achieve a sort of suspension of the ego.' Clough sees his painting as being about edges...'the kind of edges the ocean has on a humid, windy, day, of smoke and clouds, of the change in chemical states...' Clough is interested in simultaneity, in the way a static painting can operate in time. 'Paying attention to time in films by Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, even Warhol, changed my sense of what time is in a painting.'"