Charles Clough: Clufffalo: Art Omi
Photo Credit: Benjamin Swett
Visitors were invited to work with artist Charles Clough on the creation of a new Clufffalo: Art Omi painting in the gallery September 2, 2017. The finished painting is currently on view as part of Clough's gallery exhibition through the remainder of 2017.
"Clufffalo" is the term Clough uses to describe his collaboratively painted artworks and the documentation that comes out of the public workshops. Working with house paint and Big Fingers (special painting implements created by the artist specifically for painting large scale Clufffalos) participants created the foundation for a 9 x 12 foot painting, which was completed by the artist after the workshop.
Also on view in this exhibition will be Clough's monumental painting Arena, 1992. Arena was created with the public at Artpark, Lewiston, NY, and was one of the very first "Place Clufffalos," pieces created during Clough's large public workshops.
A number of smaller works "Clufffalo: Seasons" created at the Roycrofts Institute (the artist's studio in East Aurora, NY) will also be shown. The Season paintings are created using a cumulative approach. Many layers of color are added by the participants over the course of a season and then ground down to their final finished state by the artist.
Charles Clough is interested in engaging the public to make paintings with him. He states "Among my most cherished experiences have been visits with artists in their studios, including, de Kooning, Warhol, Lichtenstein, LeWitt and so many others. I think of it as 'encounter education,' in which my accumulated experience of many of an artist's works is capped by an in-person conversation. The opportunity for such is finite, as all of above are no longer available. Hence, I offer myself to those who seek a conversation about art and creativity through participating in my Cluffalo: Places and Clufffalo: Seasons."
The aesthetic of Clough's work comes from his interest in "painterly, gestural abstraction", rooted in 10th Century Chinese brushwork, J.M.W. Turner, Impressionism, Fauvism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism.
Charles Clough was born in Buffalo, NY. He studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, and the State University of NY at Buffalo. In 1974, inspired by the creation of not-for-profit exhibition spaces such as Artist's Space in NYC, Clough was instrumental in creatings Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo, NY along with fellow artists, Robert Longo, Diane Bertolo, Nancy Dwyer, Larry Lundy, Cindy Sherman and Michael Zwack.
Clough is the recipient of a Painting Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship among others.
He has work in the collections of the:
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY,
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX
Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
UB Art Galleries, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT
among many others
Charles currently lives and works in East Aurora, NY.