THE ZODIAC CONCLUSION

“The painter Charles Clough is best known for high-gloss expressionist paintings that elevate bravura brushstrokes to technicolor heights.”-Max Henry, Artnet, 2/2/99

The painterly, as a symbolic mode of great metaphoric breadth, is the basis for my continuing commitment to paint, however, other materials and processes also compel my attention.

I have been making photographs since 1967 and in 1976 I completed The Sketch for the Photographic Epic of a Painter as a Film or a Ghost, a linear composite of a hundred twenty-three photos of my studio containing the works which engaged me at that time and ending with a self-portrait. This pointed to my desire to make a work as a “great container” of all my works and impulses. Of course, like all artists, I maintain a photographic record of my work and as I became familiar with digital imaging processes in the 1990s, a solution to my intention emerged: digitize all of my images and publish them as electronic books using Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) on CD-ROMs.

Although I combined painting and photography in various bodies of works in the 1970s and early 1980s, since 1985 my modus operandi has been, to put it most simply, to extend Hofmann. A sense of personal crisis in 1999 resulted in my priority of beauty yielding to a greater concern for symbolic density. And so after painting continuously since 1971, I stopped, from May, 1999 until March, 2000, and moved my studio from New York City to the Atlantic coast of Rhode Island and renovated my procedures.

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. Layers of enamel and acrylic were added and knives and grinders effected selective removal. The unevenness of the underlying ground gave shape as the paint dried, and was subsequently “disciplined” or “repressed” out by mallets, clamps and staples to become a kind of “personal geology” replete with psychological metaphor. The soft cotton was petrified by the slow accretion of pigmented sediment and its surface intricately figured by metamorphic caresses, battery and abrasion. D. W. Winnicott’s “transitional object” and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel’s Creativity and Perversion are germane to this work.
Each painted T-shirt is mounted in a frame hinged to a cabinet (Zodiac Picture Box) holding 12 CD-ROMs with fifty PDFs containing more than four thousand stereo images, which constitute my Photo Journal for 2000.

The tradition and direction of the lineage: Titian, Rubens, Delacroix, Cézanne, Picasso, Pollock, is essential in my approach to painting. Duchamp’s modified readymades underlie my T-shirts and his Box in the Valise, my Picture Box. My new method reflects a critical affirmation of what I believe are developmental advances evident in body art, (my T-shirts) conceptual art (the photo journal) and earth art (made on the ground). Brutish, abject aspects of Dubuffet, Fontana, Kiefer and Basquiat are affirmed. And very specifically, Pollock’s last painting, Scent, and what I interpret as it’s progeny: diverse 2D/3D manifestations over that past thirty years in Richard Pousette-Dart, Lynda Benglis, Terence La Noue, Frank Owen, Joe Zucker’s wads, Rodney Ripps of the late 1970s, Schnabel’s plate paintings, thick Olitskis, Poons’s reliefs of the 1990s, Eugéne Leroy, Mark Milloff, James Hyde and recent Nabil Nahas contextualize this approach. The complex and highly particular surface necessitates direct experience for complete effect while the accompanying CD-ROMs access a detailed visual journal of my year, contrasting actual and virtual states.

In the course of producing the Zodiac T-shirts, paintskins (the dried film at the top of paint cans) were gathered on the ground. Upon completion of the project, the resulting object came to be known to me as The Terminal Painting, insofar as all-over had been realized, however, more completely: sans-support and all-around. Within a developmental progression, I believe this singular work constitutes a certain ultimatum and my subsequent painting, such as some recent watercolors, will function not as the object of the epic but rather as anecdotal fulfillment of previously visited scenarios.

The Photo Journal

Beyond documenting my artwork, I photograph that which interests me. This loosely correlates to traditional categories of painting: portraiture, landscape and still-life. For me, painting has become a ritual that results in an object of much deeper symbolic dimension and emblematic power than a photo, however photography serves greater illustrational effect and specificity. I want to have the range and condensation of an “all-over” Pollock painting, but also to bring to light the quality of my relations and richness of material encounters. The ellipsis effected by abstraction is restituted by the “pictures behind the painting”.

My photography provides for me what snapshots did for my parents, as well as how the sketchbook served my artistic predecessors. The lives of my children, the progress of studio projects, the work of other artists, views seen while walking in all sorts of urban, rural and wilderness environments are my subject. I’m especially fond of rocks and wood, from the scale of the landscape to that of the pebble and twig; as found, and as worked, referencing the broadest historical context. Volume, shape, texture and light seduce me as it was for Blossfeldt, Weston and Brancusi, whose studio photographs are especially significant to me. I have become a sculptor of the holdable.

In the early 1970s, while I was looking at my contact sheets, my eyes inadvertently crossed and superimposed two similar images and the effect and process of stereo photography became obvious. I am of the opinion that the additional information provided by the “second” photo is essential for a representation to be complete. Notions of gesture, cinema, time and space are inherent in this two-frame practice.
The recent acquisition of my Rhode Island studio and garden provides me with a subject in which the change of seasons and botanical detail offers endless inspiration. As this experience has increased my productivity, I was struck by its journalistic nature and the special text constituted by any individual’s total imagery. We are familiar with collections of up to a few hundred photos published in book form and with catalogue raisonnés of artists’ oeuvres, but a collection of thousands of photos intended to be read as a complete and singular work adds a fresh challenge to the field of photography.