Charles Clough (b. 1951)

Taylor Is With Us was painted in homage to C. Taylor Kew, who died tragically in 1992 from injuries sustained in a plane crash while on a fishing trip in Alaska. Kew, the CEO of F. N. Burt Company, had been a member and chair of the Burchfield Art Center’s Council. He collected Clough’s work and helped sponsor his two-week, public project at Artpark in 1992 called Clufffalo Arena Painting. Park visitors could use Clough’s unique “big finger” tools (invented in 1985 to paint his Brooklyn Museum lobby installation), creating a huge-scale “finger painting” relating to a child’s introduction to artmaking. Taylor Is With Us was included in the UB Art Galleries mid-career retrospective Charles Clough: The Way to Clufffalo in 2012. Sandra Q. Firmin curated the exhibition to “consider Clough’s career in relationship to the critical role Buffalo has played throughout the second half of the twentieth century in nurturing experimental cultural production from Abstract Expressionism onwards.” Clough was one of the founders and first director of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in 1974. His painting, photography, collage, video, and artists’ books demonstrate spontaneity, conscious and unconscious artistic process, and question the idea of the original versus a layered construct of altered imagery. —NW