23 Moments

For its inaugural exhibition, ONE TWELVE presents 23 Moments, a series of two distinct Clufffalo series of paintings by Charles Clough, from 1995 and 2005.

"As a teenager I pursued techniques of illustration including pen and ink and watercolor. After a year of art school in New York I realized that being an artist meant addressing issues of philosophy, psychology and sociology in a context of nominal "freedom." While "originality" was obvious aim in my teenage years, "authenticity," in terms of understanding influences and motives underlying an artist's modus operandi, became a more nuanced and slippery situation to address.

In 1970 the art world had made its way through abstract expressionism, pop, and minimalism and was in the throes of conceptual, earth, and body art. In framing my zones of interest, I pushed sculpture away because it can be heavy and a burden to keep. I like the dynamic of "greatest effect by least means" which for me meant relatively two-dimensional imagery by way of "painting," collage, and photography. I shuffled these techniques in ways that didn't look like other artists' work—like gluing photos on walls and using paint to "blend" the imagery into the place. I wanted to de-skill and primitivise my method for greater force of meaning.

These procedures led to finger-painting on art book reproductions and snapshots by 1979. I would continue the process by photographing the finger-painted photos, making enlarged prints and finger-painting them. In shuffling media I thought of it as "the photo reveals and the paint conceals—the photo serves representation and the paint serves abstraction" in an on-going, seemingly endless, "life-like" process.

Lately, Urs Fisher has gotten mileage out of re-photographed painted photos and by the late 1980s Gerhard Richter had begun to produce a huge series of over-painted snapshots—which pissed me off because I feel like I got there first. The reality is that I have seen over-painted photos by Picasso and Pollock and can only imagine that it was a very brief period after the invention of photography that artists began to add layers of color. Also, I ripped off Lynton Wells, whose painted photographs I saw in the early 1970s.

The two series referenced in 23 Moments both use a common underlying photographed and printed image of one of my paintings that is then painted on top of. These help to illustrate my overall concept of my work as "the photographic epic of a painter as a film or a ghost" by which I suggest that all of the images that I've produced be sequenced into a movie. Flip through the pages of the pdf of 23 Moments to observe its cinematic effect.

During the period when I was six to twelve years old I made scale-model cars from commercially available kits—thus relationships of scale have been an aspect of my world-view for many years. My process of finger-painting art book repros and snapshots was all about the easiness of the painting aspect and then the expense of reproducing them as large color photos. Theoretically all of my book-scaled works can be reproduced as wall-sized works. In my rustication period of working in Rhode Island, I thought of all of the 8½ x 11 inch watercolors that I made there being in 1/10th or 1/12th (as is the One Twelve model) scale. It is a pleasing fantasy that my small works could all become grander as photo-mechanical enlargements—permission is hereby granted to blow them all up!"