Chuck Close
How an artist who can’t recognize faces made a career creating paintings of faces.
Discipline: Painting
The young Chuck Close had one advantage on his road to achieving his creative potential. And this was probably his only advantage. His mother hired a tutor to give him private art lessons when he was in school. She wanted to provide a creative avenue for her son since she couldn’t follow her own artistic path. As a trained pianist, financial constraints prevented her from ever enjoying a musical career of any kind. The lessons provided an alternative educational path for Close as he was dyslexic which made school outside of art class very difficult. He was also diagnosed with a neuromuscular condition which meant he couldn’t play with the kids in his class growing up. To top it off, at a very young age Close was diagnosed with facial blindness. A disorder that impedes the ability to recognize faces even of family and close friends (1). A socially crippling condition. He was told not to go to college by all the folks at his high school. He couldn’t read properly and still had trouble with basic math. Close was told the best he could do was work at an auto body shop or enter trade school since he was good with his hands (2). Close knew it would be tough to get into college for painting but assumed that it might be easier to get into a local college.
He went to art school at the University of Washington in 1962 and used that as a stepping stone to get accepted into Yale University’s School and Architecture in 1963. They had a summer program that invited 25 to 30 art students in their junior year from other schools from around the country. In Close’s words, they were a sort of “out of town tryouts for those applying to graduate art school.“ By 1964, he won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Vienna. And would later teach painting at the University of Massachusetts (2).
Throughout his studies and teaching gigs, Abstract Expressionism was the dominant form of art at the time, and any kind of representational art was shunned by art critics. Close initially painted in an abstract style but grew frustrated and felt like he wasn’t making progress creatively or making art he enjoyed. Close explored photography and photographic printing techniques. He experimented with an obscure printmaking technique called mezzotint. Influenced by process art and the artist Sol Lewitt, whose art consisted of producing a set of instructions for others to execute in the case of his wall drawings. Close, decided he needed his own process for creating art. This involved taking a photograph and devising a grid system that he would use to transfer a photograph to a much larger nine-foot canvas. The process involved creating mini abstract paintings and shapes within each grid of the canvas. These abstract paintings had gradations in tone that when viewing the painting from further away a larger figurative, representational image could be seen larger. He enlisted his experience with the use of abstraction to create hyper-realistic paintings (3).
Close’s notable work that exhibited this duality in technique with abstract squares coming together to make a figurative whole was seen in the “The Big Nude” (1967). From photography, he’d manually reproduce by hand with paint the mechanical photo dye transfer process mimicking the dots it would create of cyan, magenta, and yellow layered on top of each other. From his experiments with the Mezzotint printing process, he took the checkerboard pattern used to create images and again replicated the technique with paint (4). He had his breakthrough when he began his “Heads” series. He refuses to call them portraits since he doesn’t do commissions and only paints his friends and family (5).
In 1969 the Walker Art Center acquired Close’s “Big Self Portrait” and this where things took off. Later in that same year, they purchased a portrait of he made of his friend the composer Philip Glass. At the time art critic Clement Greenberg went on record to state it would be pretty hard to make an artistic career painting portraits. The subject matter of people’s faces was critical for Close for many reasons. Not only was it his creative breakthrough, the images gained popularity for their size and detail, but he could now commit the pictures of friends and family to memory which he couldn’t do by looking at faces in real life. The process of painting them flattened their likeness out and helped him recognize them much better. Close also stressed the conceptual nature of the process. It was more than merely photographic reproduction in paint. He was constructing a persona with each gridded square he painstakingly painted in (6).
In 1988 more health issues attacked Close. Close suffered tremendous chest pains from a spinal cord blood clot that left him paralyzed from the neck down. This would be career ending for any artist. Close’s wife encouraged him to continue to try and paint as a form of rehabilitation. Using a device strapped to his hand that allowed him to hold a paintbrush he was able to regain movement in his arms. This in addition to a two-story mechanical remote controlled easel that moved the canvas where he needed. This allowed him to paint from his wheelchair (7). He had a methodology he developed early in his career that allowed to keep moving forward. As Close describes, It’s about breaking the problem down into chunks and tackling the canvas one grid at a time. He’s also leveraged abstraction in different ways as he no longer has the fine motor control he once did earlier in his career (8). Today Close is still one of the highest grossing living artists.
References
1. “Chuck Close Artist Overview and Analysis”. [Internet]. 2018. TheArtStory.org Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/artist-close-chuck-life-and-legacy.htm [Accessed 30 Dec 2018]
2. CBS. “Artist Chuck Close Writes Note to Younger Self.” YouTube, YouTube, 10 Apr. 2012, www.youtube.com/watchv=GxR3ELuZjLw&list=WL&index=37.
3. Rose, Charlie. “Chuck Close Interview + Painting in Studio (1998).” YouTube, YouTube, 29 July 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQyGErOy_iE&t=523s.
4. “Chuck Close Artist Overview and Analysis”. [Internet]. 2018. TheArtStory.org Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/artist-close-chuck-life-and-legacy.htm [Accessed 30 Dec 2018]
5. Rose, Charlie. “Chuck Close Interview + Painting in Studio (1998).” YouTube, YouTube, 29 July 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQyGErOy_iE&t=523s.
6. “Chuck Close Artist Overview and Analysis”. [Internet]. 2018. TheArtStory.org Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors Available from: https://www.theartstory.org/artist-close-chuck-life-and-legacy.htm [Accessed 30 Dec 2018]
7. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Chuck Close.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 3 July 2018, www.britannica.com/biography/Chuck-Close.
8. CBS. “Artist Chuck Close Writes Note to Younger Self.” YouTube, YouTube, 10 Apr. 2012, www.youtube.com/watchv=GxR3ELuZjLw&list=WL&index=37.
Originally published at blog.viktorbezic.com.
