Charles Sidney Clough (born February 2, 1951, in Buffalo, New York) is an American painter.
[1] Charles Clough was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, where he attended Hutchinson Central Technical High School.
He then attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn from 1969 to 1970 where the two-dimensional design teacher Joseph Phillips, introduced Artforum magazine to him.
He traded his sculptor's assistant services for studio space with artist Larry W. Griffis Jr., at the Ashford Hollow Foundation's 30 Essex Street former ice-house facility.
He observed closely the organization of A-Space, a not-for-profit gallery which exhibited emerging artists.
This model along with that of Artists Space in New York provided the example that Clough followed in forming Hallwalls Center for Contemporary Art.
One of these, Joseph Panone, brought his student, Robert Longo and introduced him to Clough, which resulted in the program of exhibitions and artists' visits which became Hallwalls in 1974.
Larry W. Griffis Jr. and the Ashford Hollow Foundation shared its space and its Internal Revenue Service's 501 c3 status to seek and be awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts.
Artists whose works were presented during the early years of Hallwalls include, amongst others Vito Acconci, Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Lynda Benglis, Ross Bleckner, Barbara Bloom, Eric Bogosian, Jonathan Borofsky, Chris Burden, Robert Creeley, Eric Fischl, Philip Glass, Jack Goldstein, Dan Graham, Robert Irwin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Malcolm Morley, David Salle, Julian Schnabel and Michael Snow.
[3][5][4] In 1978 after separating Hallwalls from the Ashford Hollow Foundation, establishing its board of directors and obtaining its own 501 c3 status, Clough returned to New York City to pursue his art.
"[6] In his autobiographical book of images, Pepfog Clufff, Clough has written of the period following his commitment to art that: "my examination of impulses, desires, and intentions finally began to coalesce in my journal-like Studio Notes with which I have developed the themes and procedures which articulate my meanings to this day.
At that point I had abandoned illustrational strategies for paint-as-material processes, generally, as established by Pollock and his progeny.
Identity: similarities and differences, sums of distinguishing characteristics, units of consciousness and processes of projection, introjection, and transference.
Creation: the process of nature as a metaphor for thought and action and the correlation of form and content to establish the symbolic realm.
"[7] Beginning in 1978 Herbert and Dorothy Vogel (New York City) began collecting Clough's art and since then acquired over four hundred works, many of which were distributed to a museum in each of the fifty (United) States through a project implemented by the National Gallery of Art (Washington).