Chuck Close Mark Chuck Close Big Self Portrait Walker Art Gallery

"I'1000 pre-pixel. They got information technology from me."

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"I realized that to deal with your nature is also to construct a series of limitations which just don't permit you to behave the manner you about naturally desire to behave. And so, I establish it incredibly liberating to work for a long time on something fifty-fifty though I'chiliad impatient. It did not seem like such a dichotomy or a denial of who I was. It seemed like I was taking intendance of who I was."

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"Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost everyone tin exist competent. It's the hardest medium in which to accept some sort of personal vision and to accept a signature style."

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"I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I take confront incomprehension, and once a face is flattened out, I tin retrieve information technology better."

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"Always the best time to paint is when people make up one's mind that painting is dead considering the traditions and conventions are upwards for grabs."

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"I ever thought that inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of usa but testify upwardly and become to work. You sign onto a procedure and meet where it takes you."

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"What difference does information technology brand whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? Y'all all the same have to look."

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"Yous don't have to reinvent the bicycle every twenty-four hours. Today yous will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere."

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"A photograph doesn't proceeds weight or lose weight, or modify from being happy to being sad. It's frozen. You can use it, so recycle it."

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"Ease is the enemy of the creative person. When things get likewise easy, you're in trouble."

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"A face is a road map of someone's life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there's a corking deal that's communicated about who this person is and what their life experiences have been."

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Summary of Chuck Close

Chuck Close is globally renowned for reinvigorating the art of portrait painting from the belatedly 1960s to the present solar day, an era when photography had been challenging painting'due south quondam dominance in this area, and succeeding in steadily gaining critical appreciation equally an artistic medium in its own correct. Close emerged from the 1970s painting motility of Photorealism, likewise known as Super-Realism, but and then moved well beyond its initially hyper-attentive rendering of a given subject to explore how methodical, organization-driven portrait painting based on photography's underlying processes (over its superficial visual appearances) could suggest a broad range of artistic and philosophical concepts. In improver, Close'southward personal struggles with dyslexia and subsequently, partial paralysis, have suggested real-life parallels to his professional bailiwick, as though his methodical and however as well quite intuitive methods of painting are inseparable from his own daily reckoning with the body's own vulnerable, material status.

Accomplishments

Photorealist painting of the 1970s historic the glossy, mirror-like "await" of the photograph, just after achieving that ideal, Close swiftly turned to portraiture, suggesting information technology as a means for exploring unsettling aspects of how self identity is e'er a composite and highly constructed, if not ultimately conflicted fiction.
Close's dependence on the grid as a metaphor for his belittling processes, which suggest that the "whole" is rarely more than (or less) than the sum of its parts, is a conceptual equivalent for the camera'southward analytical, serial arroyo to whatever given field of study. Every street-smart, colorful Polaroid is every bit much a time-based and fragmentary gesture as whatever more laborious stroke of the painter's brush in the cloistered studio.
Shut has worked with oil and acrylic painting, photography, mezzotint printing, and various additional media. Shifting confidently from one to the other, Close suggests that his conceptual intentions are ultimately timeless, whereas his tools or materials are infinitely interchangeable. This is partly why Close's exercise of portrait painting has for over forty years remained surprisingly "gimmicky," fifty-fifty while the larger movement of Photorealism, his earliest called stylistic idiom, has long receded into history.
Close'due south ho-hum, accumulative processes, which enlist numerous abstract color applications in the service of producing "realistic," or illusory portraits, virtually recently finds application in the art of modern tapestry via a highly illusionistic, computer-aided method of industrial weaving that Close favors for its ability to suggest the hyper-real appearance of 19^th century drinking glass photographs(daguerreotypes).

Biography of Chuck Shut

Describing how, "I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person," Chuck Shut pioneered Photorealism. "Past putting piddling marks together," he said his monumental portraits conveyed how, "a face is a road map of someone's life."

Of import Art past Chuck Close

Progression of Art

1967

Big Nude

"Big Nude" is the first painting completed in Close's signature grid process, and both its size and self-conscious championship bespeak its ambitious nature. Although the transferred epitome "reads" as a flat transcription of light and nighttime characteristic of a photo, the painting'southward variegated brushstrokes reveal Big Nude to be more than of a prototype for hereafter development than a fully resolved picture. Poised precariously betwixt a common studio exercise in figure drawing and a 1960s girlie magazine shoot, "Large Nude" also challenges the future of representational painting at a moment in history when the genre would seem to have long agone exhausted its potential for futurity evolution. But the antiseptic whiteness of the sheet hints at a new approach to the figure that might perfectly ally an instant, unforgiving photographic record of a discipline with the artist'due south reconsideration of its every component over months of studied, methodical transcription.

Acrylic on sheet - Collection Jon and Mary Shirley

1967-68

Big Self-Portrait

The tentative air of experimentation that might exist said to characterize Big Nude is nowhere apparent in Big Cocky-Portrait, a watershed painting that virtually showcases Close's unique method. Abandoning the full-body view, Close turned to one of the oldest traditions anywhere in art history, the self-portrait. Close had partially set out to abnegate the critic Clement Greenberg'southward claim that information technology was impossible for an "avant-garde" artist to work in portraiture. Closes's untraditional arroyo involved conceiving of and creating a unique kind of "mug shot," a blackness-and-white idiom that exacerbated the subject'due south blemishes and the original photographic distortion acquired past the photographic camera. The devotion to the thought of an unsparing, head-on view led him to decline all commissions, every bit Close used only his own "mug" and that of close friends for his subjects.

Acrylic on canvas - Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

1970

Kent

For Kent, Close made use of preparatory drawings for the offset fourth dimension to explore the iii-color procedure, an imitation, or re-employment, of the photographic dye-transfer method. Past adopting a mechanical procedure and mimicking it physically, or by hand crafting what is normally carried out by the camera, Close suggests that illusion is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, whose ain optical apparatus finally "completes" the picture show. Although Close literally painted the aforementioned epitome three times, 1 atop the other in carve up colors, he was surprised when the work ended up taking iii times as long to complete. In order to facilitate the process, Shut wore cellophane filters over his eyeglasses in society to view marks in one color at a fourth dimension.

Acrylic on sheet - Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

1972

Keith/Mezzotint

The big format of Keith, although non nearly as large as Close'southward earlier portrait paintings, did non interpret well to the outdated mezzotint process. Due to its gradual erosion, the plate made only ten skillful prints, and the surface coloring is noticeably lighter in the middle around the sitter's olfactory organ. The mezzotint printmaking procedure yields a soft, lite-infused surface, here seen to all-time effect in Closes'southward rendering of the sitter's pilus. The random furnishings typical of printmaking inspired Close to experiment farther with various media.

Mezzotint - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

1985

Fanny/Fingerpainting

Close's enjoyment of the concrete interaction between artist and fabric gave him a particular affinity for working in the fingerprint method. Criticized by some as a kitschy version of an art already informed by Pop, the unsophisticated technique, and then reminiscent of child'south play, seems doubly appropriate for this informal, yet subtly monumental portrait of the artist'due south grandmother. The numerous, private touches of oil pigment gradually creating the appearance of supple flesh lends to the painting a sense of intimacy and so appropriate to the underlying relationship between artist and his chosen subject area.

Oil-based acrylic on canvas - The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

1997

Self-Portrait

Chuck Close's work is most often associated in the popular mind with his own likeness. Although it has been called by the artist largely for the sake of convenience, Close's self portraits provide an interesting arena for gauging the development of his thought and work over four decades. The insouciant stare of the immature man in Big Self-Portrait makes a striking counterpart to the stolid, knowing gaze of the older Shut as represented in this self-portrait of 1997. Indeed, the comparison illustrates the evolution from fledgling artist to international icon. Compared to the before work, the 1990s Self-Portrait also shows how abstraction has come up to play a more prominent function in Closes'due south portraits. Each of the individual units of the grid is a miniature abstract painting unto itself, comprising a panoply of colors and shapes that seem to have jumped directly to the sail from the artist'due south palette.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

2006

Andres

In recent years, Close has extended his investigations into various media to the ancient genre of tapestry, the repetitive and episodic weaving process in many ways paralleling his ain painstaking juxtaposition of various colors in much of his portraiture. Using computerized photo transfers of glass daguerreotypes (for blackness-and-white versions) or Polaroid snapshots, the tapestry medium is ideally suited for Close'south interest in large-calibration work that nonetheless depends on pinpoint-like precision. Here, a portrait of artist-colleague Andres Serrano, notorious for his irreverent Piss Christ (1987) photograph that continues to roil conservative Christians, beams triumphant from the weave, which is deftly equanimous of numerous threads of various colors intertwining with such precision that the human heart is most seduced into believing that this is a existent man pressing his face up to a window.

Jacquard tapestry - PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York

Similar Art

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced past Creative person

Alex Katz
Philip Glass

Ross Bleckner

Philip Glass
Christopher Finch

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Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

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Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
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