The 3 CC Studios
Charles Clough
1994

Early in 1971, I established my studio. This followed an epiphanic episode in which my sense of
artistic scope, mission and commitment crystallized. I had arrived at the parameters of alienation
necessary for the launching of an artist and discovered my rudder of deep desire to navigate my
painter’s epic. At that point the full meaning and responsibility of “free self-creation” became clear.
The studio is the clearinghouse of the impulses and the location of the practice. The practice is the
incorporation of the impulses into a fabric of meaning—the forging of the symbol. Understanding the
impulses is a psychological and philosophical question concerning motives ranging from relatively
baser to higher. In my case this introspection was guided by reading W. James, Freud, Jung, Rank,
Erikson, Piaget, Klein, Winnicott, Horney, Laing, Lacan, Kristeva, Loewald, and Deri, on the one
hand, and Kant, Hegel, Burke, Nieztche, Kierkegaard, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Dewey, Langer,
Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, Heidegger, Adorno, Baudrillard, Danto and Rorty on the other.
Art and literary critics, as well as fiction writers and filmmakers, too numerous to list, have also
provided articulations which underly my sense of being.
The point at which I began my studio practice was a distinct rupture in life as I had known it. Indeed,
I felt reborn, and in renunciation of expectations of materialist success. As free self-creation accesses
the symbolic realm, art is an inevitable by-product. I believe that transgressing this threshold
constitutes a fourth category—the oeuvre—to be added to the id, superego and ego. This category is
manifested through the transformation of matter, in whatever degree or scale. (Even the most
dematerialized art relies on synapses.) Generally, it is in the studio where these transformations occur.
To the extent that my work is known, it is known as that of a painter. And it is a source of annoyance
to me that only small portion of my paintings have been exhibited in New York. However, my studio
practice includes drawing, writing, photography and sculpture and certain of the categories are
comprised of thousands of works. I have come to understand these various activities in terms of The
3CC Studios:
The Studio of Broken Color, The Studio of the Woods and the Stones and The Studio of Of.
The Studio of Broken Color refers to my transformation of tidy cans of paint into broken blends of
perfect destruction which function as symbols of random creation, also known as paintings. (see
Chance & Choice, page 23)
The Studio of the Woods and the Stones is where fragments of reality becomes symbols of identity,
the housing of free creation, the shrine of amazing grace. The title, The Studio of the Woods and the
Stones, stands for a number of categories of knowledge and practice. including:
1. The sciences of physics, geology and anthropology.
2. The activities and traditions of finding, collecting, mining, refining, shaping, polishing, stone,
metal and wood; aspects of jewelery, furniture and architectural embellishment, certain manner of
weaponry, and other workings of materials into tools or symbols throughout time and cultures—that
which remains of our predecessors of 2-3 million years.
3. Modern western sculpture, esp. Brancusi, Arp, Moore, Noguchi, Tucker, Fisher, Cemin, etc.
4. The oriental tradition of selecting and mounting stones of striking associational properties, known
as guaishi, in China, and suiseki, in Japan, as well as other elements of the Chinese literati tradition
including, seals, brush-holders and tablescreens, etc.
The well chosen stick or stone surges imagination. You’ve seen them, the more one looks, the better
it seems. It’s not difficult to imagine that the earliest symbol-making occurred as a these objects were
put to use. We are preceded by stone, and it will succeed us—certainly certain longer, but truly
transient too (et arcadia ego). Through our feeling for stone we gain a sense of the epic scale of
nature.
The Studio of Of, is the location of mediation: drawing, writing, photography and digital media.
When I consider drawing, I focus on the thickness of the line. When I use my big fingers, my line is
mighty thick. The most linear line I know, is the slice of the X-acto blade. Early, as a youth, I learned
sharp and tight.
When I inscribe lines, it is usually on 8 1/2 x 11” paper so that it may be readily copied. Some of my
drawings are gesturally expressive and some are repressively descriptive.
My writing is of the barest sort. The lines are simply thunderclaps of studio revelations, which
frequently amount to nothing, but occasionally, seem terribly important to me.
Photography is a living tradition handed to me from my father. Its ubiquity renders it nearly invisible.
I’ve been releasing my shutter since 1967, and have produced some 60,000 negatives and
transparencies. This work constitutes, by far, the largest sub-group of my oeuvre. Within the
sub-group are a number of more or less discrete categories including documentation of my paintings
and sculpture, documentation of the work of other artists (a journal of my exhibition viewings—my
“virtual” collection), family snapshots, and composite and stereo photos of architectural, natural
settings and arrangements of painting's and painted rocks. This constitutes the “photographic” element
of The Photographic Epic of the Painter as a Film or a Ghost—scenes or moments of extra
consciousness. Digital media will be the great container—the “film” or the “ghost” in the title. Just as
print media has made an audience for and pointed toward painting, so too, will CD-ROMs, the
internet and etc.