Chuck Close Overview

The famously disheveled self-portrait -- chest hairs threatening to tickle his chin, two eyebrows merging into one atop dark-rimmed glasses, an emphatically bulbous nose and its own unkempt follicles protruding beneath -- could not be further at odds with the obsessively... [more]

The famously disheveled self-portrait -- chest hairs threatening to tickle his chin, two eyebrows merging into one atop dark-rimmed glasses, an emphatically bulbous nose and its own unkempt follicles protruding beneath -- could not be further at odds with the obsessively methodical, every-last-millimeter-of-pigment-precisely-in-its-place consciousness of the artist who produced it. Chuck Close paints the most detailed, technically perfected portraits that twentieth-century art has known -- and the most unforgiving. Crows feet, pores, capillaries: everything one wishes a soft-focus lens would wash away takes its magnified place on an eight- or nine-foot-high canvas in Close's laborious works. Charles Thomas Close was born to a failed inventor/plumber father and a piano teacher mother who encouraged him to paint. The Yale University he encountered in the early '60s was filled with such future art luminaries as Brice Marden and Richard Serra and was overrun with Pollock and de Kooning imitators. Close left these behind in 1967, when he began to painstakingly transcribe his own face from a black-and-white photograph to an exacting grid. The increasingly technical portraits that followed partook of the Minimalist take-it-or-leave-it attitude and stretched the objectivity of Photo-Realism to unimagined extremes. None were commissioned: "I'd hate to have the feeling that I needed to straighten teeth," Close once explained. A stroke in 1989 left Close paralyzed; the heroic process of learning to paint from a wheelchair has transformed Close into an art-world legend. Technique propelled him then as always, demanding an emotional distance he imposes even on himself. "When I painted myself, I always referred to it as 'him' -- I somehow couldn't deal with the fact that it was me and whether I looked ugly or handsome or whatever," he wrote. "A face contains very specific information that people can sense is either right or wrong. That keeps me on my toes, keeps me from letting well enough alone, or saying, this is close enough -- no pun intended." [show less]