Excerpts from Notes: 1982-85
Charles Clough

The fossilization of inspiration
like a photo, like a painting
this allegory of memory and imagination
the photo reveals and the paint conceals
the photo—representation—is memory
the paint—abstraction—is imagination
the web of metaphor flickers and shimmers:
living-dead, present-absent, real-imaginary,
constructive-destructive, figure-field
male-female, serious-ridiculous, etc.
this synthetic romanticism becomes
ultra-modernism.
Developing a set of habits
like establishing relationships
like likeness to what?
what it is, what it isn’t,
something become some other thing
becoming behavior reidentified
consolidate that identity
an image to replace a self
death prep
through image rep
be my
see to see.
The resolution of conflict through depiction
battlescenes from the war against alienation and paranoia
tune the dance of life
to well modulated experience
receiving, dodging, delivering
or just give and get
the pursuit of harmony
the politics of keep on keepin’ on
the fragments of shattered monuments
to wealth and power
become macroments
to imagination and humanity.
Faith in the myth of free imagination
really endless commencement
do, redo, undo, redo
undo, redo again.
The visible and the invisible
the success and the failure
the bravura and the buckeye execution
the durable and the obsolete values
choosing changes revision
remaking reactive remedies
trace fossil imprintation
with funeary make-up.
“...the uncanny thing is that though we can’t see the figures at all we sense
that they are there itching to spring out.”—William Zimmer
Image
the essential quality of picture
the unity of color-shape
these enduring values
repossessed
put to song
the voiceless joy
distinctively
inflecting
our
Great American Paint Dance
for Grand Central Painting.