Chuck Close

Artist career

Charles Thomas “Chuck Close” was born in Monroe, Washington on July the 5^th 1940, Chuck Close lives and works to this day on the south shore of Long Island. He attended Everett Community College in 1958-1960, and then in 1962 got his B.A. from the University of Washington. In 1961 he won a scholarship to the Yale Summer School of music, After Yale he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna for a short while. When close returned to the US he worked at the University of Massachusetts as an Art Teacher.

Close is an American painter and photographer who later in his life had a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 which left him paralyzed, he continues to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors, Close also suffers from prosopagnosia which means he was born with the inability to recognize faces, by painting portraits helps him to develop the ability to remember faces. Chuck Close has said himself “I was not conscious of making a decision to paint portraits because I have a difficulty of recognizing faces.” This tells us that he was fully aware of the disadvantage that his disability gave him but did not let that stop him from what he wants to do.

Chuck close describes an encounter he has with a Jackson Pollock painting when he was at a museum with him mum at the age of 11 and he says “I went to the Seattle Art Museum with my mother for the first time when I was 11. I saw this Jackson Pollock drip painting with aluminium paint, tar, gravel and all that stuff. I was absolutely outraged, disturbed. It was so far removed from what I thought art was. However, within 2 or 3 days, I was dripping paint all over my old paintings. In a way I’ve been chasing that experience ever since.” The fact that he went away and incorporated some of Jackson Pollock’s techniques into his own work tells us that this was his influence for his abstract paintings.

Chuck Close is a Photorealist; his works are generally larger than life and highly focused. One demonstration of the way photography was considered a part of the art world was the photorealist painting in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Photorealism is also known by the names super-realism or hyper-realism. Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create his portrait paintings. The aim of this movement was to incorporate photography into the art world which they was successful at doing, his work developed throughout his life because he managed to merge both his paintings and his photographs together.

I have chosen to look into chuck close because I like the techniques and the method that he uses to do his portrait paintings. I like the grid method that his uses to start off his portrait then I also like the bright colours and swirl technique that he uses to paint inside the grid. My work and chuck closes work are very different not only in the method but in the final outcome my work is either block colours or tonal his work is very colourful and that’s just something that I don’t do in my own portrait paintings, I like for my naturalistic whereas he likes that non-naturalistic abstract look in his portraits. From looking at this artist I would like to learn the swirl technique with all the different colours that he uses when he paints his portraits