The Photographic Epic of a Painter as a Film or a Ghost
Charles Clough
1976

For painters the world will always be yet to be painted, even if it lasts millions of years...it will end
without having been conquered in painting.”—Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Surface invested with aesthetic intent is both my definition of painting and result. Such acts may be as
simple as designating a thing or a place, or as complex as representing an appearance. I think that the
perception of aesthetic intent initiates a relationship between artist and audience. This relationship is a
question of faith. For me, making art is constructing a separate identity.
Surfaces surround us. I find appropriate surfaces and embed them with my presence. Notes,
photographs, works on cardboard, films of painting and collaging processes, wallsuckers,
constellations, verbal associates and The Photographic Epic of a Painter as a Film or a Ghost
(PEPFoG) are the work I do.
I test my ideas on cardboard. Favorable results lead to wallsuckers which involve establishing a
relationship between a photograph (the object itself and what it depicts), a place and paint, which
mediates between the photo and place. The place provides its specific characteristics, the photo reveals
my choice of modifier and the paint conceals the frame of the photo to effect its union with the place.
The subject of the first photos that I glued to the wall was my eyes. These were followed by
eye-vises, which placed a photo or group of photos opposite or adjacent to photos of my eyes. The
intent of this configuration being to hold the viewer’s head between the two locations of art so that
only one could be seen at a time, and that the space in between was activated as part of the work.The
installation becomes a kind of post-performance painting wherein the artist wears the disguise of the
walls.
The words that I gather from the wallsuckers are the verbal associates which serve as extended titles of
the vises and constellations and as a continuum resemble a poem.
The Photographic Epic of a Painter as a Film or a Ghost points to the formal parameters of my oeuvre.
I want a structure that can accommodate all of my productive impulses without the constraints of a job
description. I don’t know what form PEPFoG will take—it might be a long composite of my
photographs or a film or perhaps some format of the future.