FREE ESSAY ON CHUCK CLOSE

CHUCK CLOSE

Chuck Close (born 1940) is an American photorealist specializing in close-up portraits and
self-portraits. Close is one of the very few modern realists or photorealists who focus
on the human face. In 1988, in mid-career, Close was paralyzed due to a blood clot in his
spinal column. He regained partial use of his arms, and was able to return to painting
after developing techniques which allowed him to work from a wheelchair.
All of Close's works are based on photographs he takes himself. Close always follows the
same guidelines in planning a painting. The source photograph is a tightly cropped head
and shoulder shot. The subject is a family member or friend. The finished work is always
titled by the subject's first name alone (with the exception of "Self-Portrait"). This
decision was intended to project an aura of anonymity, allowing viewers to approach the
work without preconceived ideas about the sitter.
Close's working method is extremely labor-intensive. He begins by dividing his source
photograph into a grid and creating a corresponding grid on the canvas. He then
meticulously transcribes the image onto the canvas square by square, proceeding from the
top left to the bottom right. Some of the largest canvases contain thousands of squares;
Close completes all of his paintings by hand. Given the painstaking nature of this work,
some of the earlier large-scale paintings took up to fourteen months to complete.
Close's work falls into two periods, the early and the middle, in which he is now
fruitfully engaged. It is easy to divide the two periods on either side of Close's 1988
stroke that left him unable to hold a brush. (He paints with his brush tied to his hand
by a metal and Velcro device.) Close started to work with bolder, more expressive and
colorful marks before his great physical trauma. The new work is both the same; they're
recognizable as works by Close and could be by no one else He still uses the grid and he
still paints heads. Although the amount of information the new pictures carry is less
than the old, the characters depicted seem warmer, more immediate, and more exuberant.
Close's repertory of marks has changed dramatically. In place of the discreet dots and
miniature strokes of his early work, not to mention the pictures constructed of
fingerprints he made in the early'80s, each of the enlarged squares in the new grids
contains colorful, painterly marks that function as mini- abstract paintings of their
own. Concentric circles, lozenges, hot dog and doughnut-like shapes, and freeform
squiggles are the building blocks of his new faces. His palette has expanded from black
and white and color images based on the three primaries to one that tilts toward yellow
and flesh tones at one extreme, and deep purples and blues on the other.
In brief, Close's exploration of color has been equally thorough and systematic. He began
by imitating black-and-white photography, then pioneered a three-color process akin to
that used in commercial printmaking. Since 1986, Close has used oil paint as his primary
painting medium, and currently favors brushwork that mixes colors in a lively, seemingly
playful manner, so that each square in his grid is like a miniature mosaic. He is
presently one of the most remarkable and well-known artists of the 20th century.