Charles Thomas Close (Chuck Close) is an American contemporary artist.
He is strongly associated with the photorealist movement of the 60’s and 70’s along with artists such as Richard Estes and Audrey Flack. The photorealist movements’ intentions were to create artwork that was true to life. They achieved this by working from photographs rather than from life.
However Chuck Close does not like the word photorealism being associated with his work as he is ‘as interested in the artificial as he is the real and it is really the tension between, a ripping back and forth, the distribution of the flat marks on the surface of a painting,’ he’s made by rubbing coloured dirt, with a stick with hairs glued on the end of it all over some cloth wrapped over some sticks, it’s a highly artificial activity making a painting and their made by hand slowly piece by piece, not a way a photograph is made or an image on a computer screen. When viewers are confronted with one of his huge painting and they are looking at it they are seeing the journey that he took to build the image.
I have chosen to look at one of Close’s most recent pieces of work, Self Portrait (Yellow Raincoat), 2013.
Close never works at a small scale, this piece is 190.5 x 152.4 cm and he once said himself that, ‘If you paint a face big enough, it’s hard to ignore.’ This work is a kind of computer aided watercolour. Close selected and arranged swatches of watercolour squares from over 14,000 he hand painted separately. The finished works are printed on watercolour paper with watercolour paint in several layers of cyan, magenta & yellow. This building up of an image from separate images gives it this pixelated photo effect. The subject matter is him and is has a simple composition a frontal head and shoulders. It has a blue background. It is composed like a passport photo expressionless and unforgiving, with wrinkles and age spots.
Most of Chuck Close’s artworks are like this, people in passport like poses. This is because he has Prosopagnosia, face blindness, and creating a flat image of a person helps him recognise a person. He therefore only creates artworks about people of importance to him; friends, family, other artists. His condition is also crucial to the way he creates his artwork; he breaks the face down into units by using a grid and builds up the painting from these units. Close says, ‘my subjects are not people. I paint portraits of photographs.’ This makes the viewer not focus on the subject matter but on how the portrait is made, because of this grid technique they see it as Chuck Close does a build-up of painted shapes rather than a whole photorealistic portrait.
His artwork has changed over time naturally as all artists develop their work however Chuck Close’s artwork changes for a different reason. He suffered from a seizure in 1988 that forced him into a wheelchair and meant he had to relearn how to do a lot of things, including paint. He now paints with a paintbrush strapped to his wrist.
In conclusion if you compare Chuck Close with his work, you can see that both of them have gone through quite an impressive journey.
