CHARLES CLOUGH; NEWPORTFOLIO
Renewal in Rhode Island
Charles Clough’s artistic renewal began in 1999 when the once "hot"
postmodern abstract expressionist painter lost his studio and his dealer
in New York City and moved to rural Westerly, Rhode Island, the birthplace
of his father-in-law and the family vacation spot. It was a spiritual
as well as artistic rebirth, heralded by what Clough calls The
Terminal Painting, a work formed from paint skins (dried film at the
top of paint cans). Well-known in the New York art world of the 1980s
for slathering swirls of enamel on masonite or canvas with a padded tool
he called a “big finger,”.
Clough symbolically "terminated" his use of enamel in 1999.
He turned instead to the “rhythmic correspondence” of drawing
and watercolor, producing over a thousand works, from which are selected
thirty-two works for this exhibition, completed during the last two years.
Clough says that his sense of avant-garde priorities has evaporated, becoming
replaced with a deepening concern for tradition inspired by nature. Clough,
however, puts a spin on the traditional inspiration of nature, referencing
artists from Charles Burchfield
to Matisse and Cézanne
and even his own previous work (Plates 18
and 19 are based on Figure 2).
He clearly respects the watercolor tradition of Burchfield, Dove and Marin
who in their early works transposed the sounds and vibrations of nature
into pictorial images. This Asian sensibility of ch’i (breath of
spirit, vital force) is invoked in much of the new work with gestural
brushstrokes akin to those of a sumi brush painting or the flowing symbolic
script of calligraphy. Nevertheless, the lush color and swirling vortices
can’t disguise Clough’s previous connections with the historically
disparate contexts of New York abstract expressionism and postmodernism
and his synthesis of that which is new in NEWPORTFOLIO.
In a sense, Clough has come full circle. After attending Pratt Institute
and the Ontario College of Art, as well as doing commissioned pen and
ink drawings of houses in the late
1960s and early 1970s , Clough made a series of watercolors
inspired by the color-stain painting of Morris Louis .Thus began his engagement
with the formal application of paint, in which he experimented over the
years with line, color, pattern, density and spatial illusion. He has
always used photography, to document his work and as part of his work,
blurring the lines between duplicating, copying and creating. Clough writes,
“Combining painting and photography as in Repose
. articulates the dialectic of the photo ‘revealing’ and serving
representation and the paint ‘concealing’ and serving abstraction,
simultaneously on the picture plane.”1 Clough’s manipulated
constructions began with art book reproductions of works by great artists,
which he then overpainted, cut-up, collaged, and rephotographed. The work
had an affinity with postmodernism and its dictum that high and mass culture
serve as source material for an artist’s expression. Clough pursued
this interest in the interconnectedness of representation, abstraction
and symbol-making in pieces such as The
Conflict . His artistic explorations were the subject of numerous
gallery shows and were discussed in Art in America, Artforum, the New
York Times and many other venues.
The lure of paint by itself drew Clough by the mid-1980s, and pouring
enamel on masonite, he began to create large-scale “finger-paintings”—made
with a rubber-headed device of his
own design . Writing for www.artnet.com, Max Henry described the work:
“Each…measures about four by five feet. Their slick shiny
surfaces are distinguished by their strokes and individual pools of color,
and their frenetic compositions compel the viewer to take pause with each
panel. Not since Hans Hofmann has an abstract expressionist been able
to compose so well with the entire palette.”2 Clough’s acclaimed
gestural technique was inaugurated in a trio of works commissioned by
the Brooklyn Art Museum in 1986 entitled Three
Paintings for One Wall . It was this style of painting that Clough
pursued until 1999 (Plates 6 and 7)
and which raised him to critical heights in the New York art world.
Clough had his roots in Buffalo, New York, where he was born in 1951,
came of age artistically and has often returned over the years. In 1974,
with fellow artists Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Nancy Dwyer and Michael
Zwack, Clough founded Hallwalls,
an alternative exhibition space in Buffalo where artists-in-residence
included Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Jonathan Borofsky, Robert Mangold
and others. It was the site of one of Clough’s first solo exhibitions
(he has had over fifty) in 1976, which saw him creating installations
made with photographic elements glued and “blended” with paint
onto the walls (Figure 4). In 1991
Clough returned to Buffalo in a career survey show which was held at three
venues: Hallwalls, the Michael Rockefeller Gallery at SUNY Fredonia, and
the Castellani Art Museum at Niagara University. Reviewing the exhibition
in the July 1992 Art in America, Elizabeth Licata wrote, “Charles
Clough half-jokingly refers to his work as ‘po-mo-ab-ex-post-imp-fauvish
dreampix,’ a label which betrays his rueful awareness of painting’s
current situation as well as his confidence in its possibilities. Keeping
one foot solidly planted in the modernist tradition, Clough simultaneously
explores strategies based on art-historical citation and mechanical distancing.
The result is an exhilarating and oddly compelling body of work.”3
The vicissitudes of the art world are unpredictable however; despite
a career full of accolades not to mention 1200 paintings, 3500 drawings,
60,000 photos, 225 sculptures and representation in numerous museums,
Clough found himself bereft of studio space, gallery space and income
in the late 1990s. Reiterating his concern for the depth and breadth of
meaning represented by the artist’s oeuvre, exemplified by The
Souvenir of a Sketch for the Photographic Epic of a Painter as a Film
or a Ghost. he began a photo-journal which documented the transition
from New York to Rhode Island, where he established a new studio in his
garage. In one of several artistic undertakings which symbolized his new
life, Clough painted a dozen T-shirts, lying them on the ground in his
garden, applying numerous layers of enamel and then in October, “harvesting,”
by grinding through and polishing the layers of paint as in Aquarius.
Clough writes, “and so it was that I came to paint where the earth
meets the sky, on twelve of my worn, inside-out, ‘disarmed’
T-shirts, arranged in a circle, suggesting the compass, the clock and
the calendar, on the lawn, over the course of the growing season and titled
after the signs of the Zodiac.”1 He combined the photo-journal with
the T-shirts in the Zodiac Picture Boxes, each of which holds a T-shirt
and 12 CD/ROMS containing the entire 4,500 elements of the photo-journal
for 2000.
Philosophical about his crisis and strengthened by resolve, Clough has
now welcomed transition and transformation. His new body of work is full
of vibrancy. His studio notes, musings and drawings, always so integral
to his artistic evolution, his watercolors which build on works from thirty
years ago (Plates 10 and 11),
his continuing pursuit of the photographic process combined with twenty-first
century computer technology—all have been reborn in Rhode Island.
Both Purgatory Chasm (Plates 28,
29, 30
and 31) and Weekapaug Beach (Plates
32, 33,
34, 35,
36 and 37)
prove evocative subjects for Clough’s artistic manipulation. The
book format is yet another extension of his creative intent. Ultimately
Clough’s work “shuffles the hot romantic concerns of abstract
expressionism with the icy distance of classical postmodernism,”
in a sensibility he calls “cultural nature,” which resonates
with the effect first identified by the late William Olander in 1987:
“Clough has developed yet another hybrid—a painting which
is simultaneously genuine and artificial, cultural and natural, full and
empty, without resorting, overtly at least, to the ideological apparatuses
of late modernism.”4 and Clough characterizes as: “transformation,
inflection, turbulence; a very particular vibrating cosmic tension; weave
of force; harmonics of intentionality; subliminal erotics of creation;
spontaneity, evocativity; meaning as desire and fear in smoky arabesque;
rippling quench; refracting enigmatic shimmer; the lethal chop of value;
subtle ofity of itness; dancing with tradition, accepting, rejecting and
relentless execution; the power in the compulsion to create as a measure
of the ultimacy of humanness, depth of drama; a pulsing overlay, overlap,
palimpsest, wave upon wave to come again & again & again...”
—Nancy Whipple Grinnell,
Curator, Newport Art Museum
1. and following quotations from correspondence with the artist, November
2002.
2. Henry, Max, “Review: Charles Clough” www.
artnet.com, February 2, 1999.
3. Licata, Elizabeth, Charles Clough’s Dreampix, Art in America,
July, 1992.
4. Olander, William, Two Painters: Charles Clough and Mimi Thompson, On
View at the New Museum, (Bulletin) November 27, 1987.
This publication is dedicated to the memory of Mary Lou Koessler Vogt
Plates 27 through 41 are the Newport part of the NEWPORTFOLIO
Figures 1-6 and Plates 1-26 follow:
