Charles Clough
Alan Jones
Galleria Peccolo,Livorno, Italy
August-September 1986
(Alan Jones is an American poet living in Paris.)

In an age of slap-dash painting, some painters still trod the less traveled path, that of deliberately
taking the time to evolve a vocabulary of their own. Charles Clough began with, quite literally, a
“hands on” approach: fingerpainting. “I worked on very tiny paintings on paper for four years to
develop a sense of imagery. As spontaneous as my work looks, it is all about the development of an
image”. Often Clough would fingerpaint over pictures from remaindered art history texts. Later, he
would enlarge the results photographically, and at a certain point he even made several “Machine
Paintings”, by means of a 3M process: a bank of airbrushes hooked up to a computer “painted” on
canvas by scanning a transparency. The result? “They were gross!” Recalls the artist. “I mean, they
looked like tenth generation stain paintings.” The question of faithfully translating the qualities of his
miniatures into larger works remained unsolved.
The next step was taken last year; openly declaring his obsession with the schlock abstraction of
Jenkins, Neiman, Nierman, Sansone, Matta—meets Spin-art in deep space, the painter took to using
stencils to apply thick paint over airbrushed backgrounds, creating what he termed “an ultimate
ironical phony painting. I thought of them as poster reproductions.” Clough found out how much he
needs the whole automatist, Ab-Ex, zen gestural process—the physical act of painting. “There were
two problems. First, the stencil paintings were too didactic. But much worse than that, they weren’t
any fun to make”.
But using stencils to push the paint around on a larger surface ultimately helped Clough successfully
break the scale barrier. “Stencils suggested making blotter pads shaped like big fingers. Add a couple
of gallons of paint to the canvas, and the big fingers to articulate the color-shapes”. Clough is clear
about his motives: the quest for the lucky accident “to reach that magic moment when you become so
involved in the work—the sheer joy of making—that you achieve a sort of suspension of the ego,”
contrasted to the working methods of the highly intentional painters. Clough sees his paintings as
being about edges, not the edges of the traditional formalist rectangle, but “the kind of edges the
ocean has on a humid windy day, of smoke and clouds, of the change in chemical states, the
boundary between a solid and a liquid, a liquid and a gas”. Retaining deep affinities with de
Kooning, Pollock and the British painter Hodgkins, Clough, with his bent for photography, is
attracted to the work of Gerhard Richter, who achieves a sort of unrealism on canvas. “I’m very
taken by Richter’s highly sophisticated facility”.
Clough is interested in simultaneity, in the way a static painting can operate in time. Filmmakers have
influenced him. “Paying attention to time in films by Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage and Warhol,
amongst others, changed my sense of how time operates in relation to painting”.