Chuck Close
De’Jon Warren
Art 4B
25 October 2017
Chuck Close
Chuck Close, born Charles Thomas Close is an American photorealist painter photographer known for his massive-scale portrait. He is also known for abstract works of himself and others which often hang in international collections. Sadly, a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, but his fame continues to grow and may even be supported by his dedication to his craft despite him having little control of the waist down.
Close, as a child, struggled in school. He suffered from a neuromuscular condition that made it difficult to lift his feet and often had bouts of sickness that kept him out months at a time. Even when he as in school, his dyslexia also held him back, making art one of his few solaces. Most of his early works are very large portraits based on photographs, using Photorealism or Hyperrealism, of family and friends, often other artists. He suffers from prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and has suggested that this condition is what first inspired him to do portraits. Close studied at Yale with a few noticed modern artists. After Yale, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna for a while on a Fulbright …show more content…
grant, and later he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts. Close came to New York City in 1967 and established himself in SoHo.
Since then, he has grown to use a variety of drawing and painting techniques as ink, graphite, pastel, watercolor, conté crayon, finger painting, and stamp-pad ink on paper; printmaking techniques, such as Mezzotint, etching, woodcuts, linocuts, and silkscreens; as well as handmade paper collage, Polaroid photographs, Daguerreotypes, and Jacquard tapestries.
His early airbrush techniques inspired the development of the ink jet printer.
Prior to Yale, he was supposedly "destined to become a third-generation abstract expressionist, although with a dash of Pop iconoclasm." He also played around with figurative constructions, black and white photographs, and appropriation. In 1967, he made an artistic decision of only using non-paint media in his
work.
He soon became known for his style of creation. Working from a gridded photograph, he builds his images by applying one careful stroke after another in multi-colors or grayscale. He works methodically, starting his loose but regular grid from the left hand corner of the canvas. This helps him in recognizing faces. While 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 by 83.5 inches (273 cm × 212 cm) canvas, made in over four months in 1968, and acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1969.
Art 4B
25 October 2017
Chuck Close
Chuck Close, born Charles Thomas Close is an American photorealist painter photographer known for his massive-scale portrait. He is also known for abstract works of himself and others which often hang in international collections. Sadly, a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, but his fame continues to grow and may even be supported by his dedication to his craft despite him having little control of the waist down.
Close, as a child, struggled in school. He suffered from a neuromuscular condition that made it difficult to lift his feet and often had bouts of sickness that kept him out months at a time. Even when he as in school, his dyslexia also held him back, making art one of his few solaces. Most of his early works are very large portraits based on photographs, using Photorealism or Hyperrealism, of family and friends, often other artists. He suffers from prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and has suggested that this condition is what first inspired him to do portraits. Close studied at Yale with a few noticed modern artists. After Yale, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna for a while on a Fulbright …show more content…
grant, and later he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts. Close came to New York City in 1967 and established himself in SoHo.
Since then, he has grown to use a variety of drawing and painting techniques as ink, graphite, pastel, watercolor, conté crayon, finger painting, and stamp-pad ink on paper; printmaking techniques, such as Mezzotint, etching, woodcuts, linocuts, and silkscreens; as well as handmade paper collage, Polaroid photographs, Daguerreotypes, and Jacquard tapestries.
His early airbrush techniques inspired the development of the ink jet printer.
Prior to Yale, he was supposedly "destined to become a third-generation abstract expressionist, although with a dash of Pop iconoclasm." He also played around with figurative constructions, black and white photographs, and appropriation. In 1967, he made an artistic decision of only using non-paint media in his
work.
He soon became known for his style of creation. Working from a gridded photograph, he builds his images by applying one careful stroke after another in multi-colors or grayscale. He works methodically, starting his loose but regular grid from the left hand corner of the canvas. This helps him in recognizing faces. While 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 by 83.5 inches (273 cm × 212 cm) canvas, made in over four months in 1968, and acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1969.