Specielt karakteristisk for Wrights værker er, at han i hovedparten af billederne bruger blæk/tusch. Disse vandopløselige medier kan ikke umiddelbart blandes med oliefarver, hvorfor der opstår den effekt at det olieskyende blæk ligger som små perler ovenpå olien og på mange af billederne danner et "tæppe af ælde", som giver billederne en effektfuld aura af mystik, hvor beskueren kan gå på opdagelse og finde skjulte motiver, der undsiger sig ved første blik. Den tachistiske malemåde som Mark Tobey lærte ham, gav ham friheden til at begynde en maleproces uden egentligt mål i sigte og derved lade underbevidstheden "tilsvine" det blanke ark/nøgne lærred, som er mange kunstneres skræk.
Endvidere er Wrights arbejder karakteriseret ved figurative abstraktioner, rene abstraktioner, drømmeverdenen, eventyrlighed, den fabulerende fortælling, spontanitet, dynamik, magi, kaos, orientalsk inspiration, leg, livsglæde, humor, satire, elegante kvinder, smukke mænd, langlemmede skikkelser, intens farvevalg, gennemarbejdet baggrund, små penselstrøg, konturer, skravering og et utal af materialer.

Clifford Wright fotograferet i forbindelse med sin store retrospektive udstilling på Den Frie i 1993. Clifford Wright, 1993. Clifford, Elsa med Jonathan på skødet, David og Barbara, Åsø gamle skole. Clifford, Elsa with Jonathan on her lap, David and Barbara, the schoolhouse in Åsø. Clifford Wright (1919-1999). The artist Charles Clifford Wright was born as Oswald Kallunki i Washington State, USA, on 19 November 1919 and died 30 September 1999 in Damsholte on the island of Moen, Denmark. His biological parents were the Finnish immigrant and lumberjack Arvid Kallunki and his wife Edith Pekkanen. Wright got his name from and grew up near Seattle with foster parents Charles P. Wright, a carpenter, and his wife Bertha May Hill. He had no knowledge of his biological parents until many years later, when, encouraged by friends at the artists’ colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., he got in touch with the Red Cross in the hope that they could help him find his parents. Some years later he got an unexpected phone call from California. It was his biological father who explained that he had put his children in foster care when his wife, Clifford’s mother, died, and that he had lost contact to the foster parents due to a bureaucratic mix-up. Clifford went to see his father and years later visited his father’s home town in northern Finland to meet his numerous Finnish relatives.

Wright's training as a painter began in Seattle, where he studied at the Cornish School of Art with Mark Tobey and Walter Reese, among others. Tobey became his true mentor and a life-long friend. After working at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) for three years he left the Northwest for New York in the fall of 1946. In 1947, he was awarded a stay at Yaddo. He returned next year to take a position as assistant to the director of Yaddo, Elizabeth Ames, and remained until 1955. In the summer of 1952, he met the writer Elsa Gress, his future wife, who was one of that year’s grantees.  

In 1956, Wright, who was known to fellow-artists as bisexual, went on his first tour of Europe with a well-built young man – Wright had a thing for big muscles in both men and women, especially female life-guards. When they got to Antwerp, however, Wright was abandoned by his young friend, who had taken all the cash. Spurned, Wright was alone in Europe without a cent, so he got in touch with Elsa Gress, with whom he had had a fling after a party at Yaddo back in ’52. Weeks after arriving in Copenhagen, Wright married Elsa Gress and this marriage of two seemingly so different characters lasted until Elsa’s death in 1988.  

At that time, Elsa Gress was living in a little cold-water apartment on Teglgaardsstræde in central Copenhagen with her son David, whom she had by the American literary scholar Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis, who acknowledged paternity, but no responsibilities. In the spring of 1957, Clifford and Elsa moved from Teglgårdsstræde to a somewhat larger cold-water apartment on Amagerbrogade in Copenhagen. While living there they had, a year apart, their two children Barbara and Jonathan, while Clifford adopted David.  

A lucky picture sale in 1959 yielded $500, which allowed the family to leave the Copenhagen apartment and move to a disused village schoolhouse in Åsø the middle of Zealand. There they created Decenter, a place of encounter for artists from Denmark and abroad. The name was a play on ”center”, specifically the notion of government-supported centers of culture such as those proposed by the then minister of culture, Bodil Koch, in 1963. The proposal was never put into practice because it was seen as elitist. Clifford and Elsa’s ”de-Center”, on the other hand, never received government money and survived mainly on Elsa’s and Clifford’s sporadic income and contributions by visitors.  

In 1972, for financial reasons, Clifford Wright and Elsa Gress had to abandon the old school in Åsø. Fortunately, they had the offer of free housing and painting supplies for Clifford on the estate of Marienborg on the island of Moen, owned by Count Peter Moltke, a family friend, and so Decenter continued at Marienborg, although Moltke’s illness and death in 1981 severely circumscribed its activities. Wright was given the run of a very large studio, where the major part of his artistic work came into being.  

As husband to Elsa Gress, Wright lived his homosexuality in his imagination and in the imagery of some of his paintings. He was happy with his life in Denmark, although he never learned to speak the language. He was helpless in many practical matters and dependent on Elsa in all respects, including money, since she was the chief earner. He was proud of Elsa’s literary and dramatic achievements and of her fame. For his part, he was a retiring and modest person, who rarely took part in festivities with strangers, not even when Her Majesty Queen Margrethe and the Prince Consort, Henrik, visited Marienborg in January of 1982. Clifford stayed in the kitchen with the servants while Elsa entertained the royal couple for hours. In letters, however, he happily and at length told friends about his exhibitions, commissions, and awards.

In the spring of 1988, Wright exhibited at the House of Denmark on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, and Elsa was along for the last time; she died that July. Clifford never recovered from the loss of his wife and lost the desire to paint.

Wright’s work has been exhibited, among other places, in New York, Brussels, Paris, Copenhagen, Aalborg and Stockholm.

He received grants from The National Academy of Arts and Letters, the Huntington Hartford Foundation, Yaddo, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Egill Jacobsen Foundation.

Most of Wright’s work consists of fantastic abstractions and abstract figurative pieces. He designed a series of posters for DSB, the Danish State Railways, decorated the railroad station in Sønderborg (1989, his last completed work), and designed costumes for the production of the play "Tom Paine" by Paul Foster at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen (1968).

In 1962 he published a book on the history and character of American art entitled "The Hero of the New World", issued in Danish by Borgens Forlag. He was a prolific illustrator and designer of book jackets.

Many have said of Wright’s work that it cannot be contained in the systems of classification often needed by art historians and critics to define and locate the work of an artist. This is not true, unless one insists on a slavishly chronological sequence of styles. Wright’s approach to his own work was not based on any strict intellectual category. He painted as he wished and was unconsciously a seeker, and if one day he provided the flat surface with an abstract composition, and the next a monochrome fantasy, this was quite consistent with his way of working. Wright may not have had strictly defined periods, but he had his areas of focus in the sense that he constantly returned to them: abstraction, figuration, the poster, the caricature, and certain others.  

Many of Wright’s works are characterized by use of ink/Indian ink. These water-soluble media cannot out of hand be mixed with oil paint, and the oil-shying ink forms small pearls on top of the oil, creating a "layer of antiquity", which gives the paintings a striking aura of mystery, where the spectator can go on a voyage of discovery and find hidden motifs. The Tachist way of painting which Mark Tobey taught him, gave him freedom to begin an aimless painting process, permitting the subconscious mind to "mess up" the blank sheet of paper/blank canvas, something many painters are afraid of.

Furthermore Wright's works are characterized by figurative abstraction, pure abstraction, dream worlds, fantasies, imaginary tales, spontaneity, dynamism, magic, chaos, Oriental inspiration, play, "joi de vivre", humor, satire, elegant ladies, handsome men, long-limbed figures, intense choice of color, detailed backgrounds, small brushstrokes, contours, hatching, and a wide range of materials.