Chuck Close

Chuck Close
Mark (1978–1979), acrylic on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Detail at right of eye. Mark, a painting that took fourteen months to complete, was constructed from a series of airbrushed layers that imitated CMYK color printing. Compare the picture's integrity close up with the later work below, executed through a different technique.
Birth name	Charles Thomas Close
Born	July 5, 1940 (1940-07-05) (age 71) Monroe, Washington
Nationality	American
Field	photorealistic painter, photographer,
Training	B.A., University of Washington in Seattle, 1962 M.F.A., Yale University

Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close (born July 5, 1940, Monroe, Washington)^[1] is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors.

Life and work

Chuck Close's father died when he was eleven years old. Most of his early works are very large portraits based on photographs (Photorealism or Hyperrealism technique) of family and friends, often other artists. In 1962, he received his B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle. He then attended graduate school at Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1964. After Yale, he lived in Europe for a while on a Fulbright grant. When he returned to the US, he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts.

Close had been known for his skillful brushwork as a graduate student at Yale University. As he explained in a 2009 interview with the Cleveland Ohio Plain Dealer, he made a choice in 1967 to make art hard for himself and force a personal artistic breakthrough by abandoning the paintbrush. "I threw away my tools", Close said. "I chose to do things I had no facility with. The choice not to do something is in a funny way more positive than the choice to do something. If you impose a limit to not do something you've done before, it will push you to where you've never gone before."^[2]

Close's first one-man show was in 1970. His work was first exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art in early 1973. In 1979 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial. "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs. The everyday nature of the subject matter of the paintings likewise worked to secure the painting as a realist object."^[3]

One photo of Philip Glass was included in his black and white series in 1969, redone with water colors in 1977, again redone with stamp pad and fingerprints in 1978, and also done as gray handmade paper in 1982.

Close suffers from Prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, in which he is unable to recognize faces. By painting portraits, he is better able to recognize and remember faces.^[4] On the subject, Close has said, "I was not conscious of making a decision to paint portraits because I have difficulty recognizing faces. That occurred to me twenty years after the fact when I looked at why I was still painting portraits, why that still had urgency for me. I began to realize that it has sustained me for so long because I have difficulty in recognizing faces."^[5]

Lucas (1986–1987), oil & pencil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Detail at right of eye. The pencil grid and thin undercoat of blue is visible beneath the splotchy "pixels." The painting's subject is fellow artist Lucas Samaras.

Although his later paintings differ in method from his earlier canvases, the preliminary process remains the same. To create his grid work copies of photos, Close puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell. Typically, each square within the grid is filled with roughly executed regions of color (usually consisting of painted rings on a contrasting background) which give the cell a perceived 'average' hue which makes sense from a distance. His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. His first picture with this method was Big Self Portrait, a black and white enlargement of his face to a 107.5 in by 83.5 in (2.73 m by 2.12 m) canvas, made in over four months in 1968, and acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1969. He made seven more black and white portraits during this period. He has been quoted as saying that he used such diluted paint in the airbrush that all eight of the paintings were made with a single tube of mars black acrylic.

Later work has branched into non-rectangular grids, topographic map style regions of similar colors, CMYK color grid work, and using larger grids to make the cell by cell nature of his work obvious even in small reproductions. The Big Self Portrait is so finely done that even a full page reproduction in an art book is still indistinguishable from a regular photograph.

Close has also continued to explore difficult photographic processes such as daguerreotype in collaboration with Jerry Spagnoli and sophisticated modular/cell-based forms such as tapestry. Close's photogravure portrait of artist Robert Rauschenberg, “Robert” (1998), appeared in a 2009 exhibition at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, featuring prints from Universal Limited Art Editions.^[6] Close's wall-size tapestry portraits, in which each image is composed of thousands of combinations of woven colored thread, depict subjects including Kate Moss, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Lucas Samaras, Philip Glass, and Close himself.^[7] They are produced in collaboration with Donald Farnsworth of Magnolia Editions in Oakland, CA.^[8]

In 2000, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.^[9]

Close currently lives and paints in Bridgehampton, New York. He has been represented by The Pace Gallery, in New York since 1977.^[10]

Close appeared on The Colbert Report on August 12, 2010, where he admitted he watches the show every night.

Christopher Finch wrote a biography, Chuck Close: Life, which was published in 2010.

"The Event"

On December 7, 1988, Close felt a strange pain in his chest. That day he was at a ceremony honoring local artists in New York City and was waiting to be called to the podium to present an award. Close delivered his speech and then made his way across the street to Beth Israel Medical Center where he suffered a seizure which left him paralyzed from the neck down. The cause was diagnosed as a spinal artery collapse.^[11] Close called that day "The Event". For months, Close was in rehab strengthening his muscles with physical therapy; he soon had slight movement in his arms and could walk, yet only for a few steps. He has relied on a wheelchair since.

However, Close continued to paint with a brush strapped onto his wrist with tape, creating large portraits in low-resolution grid squares created by an assistant. Viewed from afar, these squares appear as a single, unified image which attempt photo-reality, albeit in pixelated form. Although the paralysis restricted his ability to paint as meticulously as before, Close had, in a sense, placed artificial restrictions upon his hyperrealist approach well before the injury. That is, he adopted materials and techniques that did not lend themselves well to achieving a photorealistic effect. Small bits of irregular paper or inked fingerprints were used as media to achieve astoundingly realistic and interesting results. Close proved able to create his desired effects even with the most difficult of materials to control. He spoke candidly about the impact disability had on his life and work in the book Chronicles of Courage: Very Special Artists written by Jean Kennedy Smith and George Plimpton and published by Random House.^[12]

See also

• List of Chuck Close subjects
• The Portrait Now

References

1. ^ "Chuck Close". Art in the Allen Center. http://www.cs.washington.edu/building/art/ChuckClose/. Retrieved 2007-08-15. 
2. ^ Norman, M. Contemporary Art Legend Chuck Close Talks About Painting, The Plain Dealer, September 1, 2009
3. ^ Thompson, Graham: American Culture in the 1980s (Twentieth Century American Culture) Edinburgh University Press, 2007
4. ^ For Chuck Close, an Evolving Journey Through the Faces of Others PBS Newshour July 6, 2010
5. ^ Yuskavage, Lisa. "Chuck Close", "BOMB Magazine", Summer, 1995. Retrieved July 25, 2011.
6. ^ Genocchio, B: Prints That Say Bold and Eclectic, The New York Times, March 4, 2009
7. ^ "Capital Roundup." artnet Magazine. Retrieved on 2009-04-09.
8. ^ Finch, Christopher (2007). Chuck Close: Work. Prestel. pp. 286. ISBN 978-3-7913-3676-3. 
9. ^ Lifetime Honors – National Medal of Arts
10. ^ The Pace Gallery website
11. ^ O'Hagan, Sean Head Master, The Observer, October 9, 2005
12. ^ Chronicles of Courage: Very Special Artists.

Sources

• Bartman, William; Joanne Kesten (editors) (1997). The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close in Conversation with 27 of his subjects. A.R.T. Press, New York. ISBN 0923183183. 
• Greenberg, Jan; Sandra Jordan (1998). Chuck Close Up Close. DK Publishing. ISBN 0789426587. 
• Wei, Lilly (essay) (2009). Chuck Close: Selected Paintings and Tapestries 2005-2009. PaceWildenstein. ISBN 978-1-930743-99-8. 

External links

• The Pace Gallery
• Watch Chuck Close and Robert Storr in Conversation on BUniverse
• Watch/listen to full episode of KCRW's "Art Talk: Close-Up on Chuck Close"
• "Close Encounters," artNet Magazine, 8-05-08.
• "Close Call" By Jon Marmor
• Chuck Close at the Museum of Modern Art
• Chuck Close at the Walker Art Center
• Images of Chuck Close tapestries
• Chuck Close: Process & Collaboration
• Habits of Disbelief: Chuck Close by John Haber
• Book Review of "A Couple Ways of Doing Something"
• Images of Chuck Close Prints
• Antiques Roadshow segment with a Chuck Close abstract painting

Interviews

• Smithsonian Archives of American Art: Interview, 1987
• Finding the Color World: Interview with Chuck Close, 2002
• Chuck Close and Bob Holman in Conversation, 2006
• One hour interview with Charlie Rose at Google Video (March 15, 2007)
• Chuck Close Q&A with Men's Vogue
• URBAN-MUSE.COM interview with Chuck Close at his NYC Studio (Young Artists and 9/11)
• "Close-Up," Chuck Close interviewed by biographer Christopher Finch in Guernica Magazine

Persondata
Name	Close, Chuck
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	July 5, 1940
Place of birth	Monroe, Washington
Date of death
Place of death