A review of my Chuck Close Presentation
The main criticism of my Chuck Close Presentation by my peers and tutor was that it was too short. I stuck to the essential information meaning the presentation was around 7 minutes long instead of around 10-15 with questions. Information I should have included was what photorealism was about, who Chuck Close was influenced by and a review by a critic about Chuck Close's work. I f I did my presentation again what I would have added to it is shown here in red:
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 movement evolved from Pop Art and was a reaction to Abstract Expressionism and the Minimalism art movements.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.
Chuck Close was influenced by the work of Jackson Pollock which he saw as a child. This work was what influenced him to become an artist. He describes his encounter like this "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 aluminum 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." Another artist that had inspired him was William de Kooning and he emulated his work during much of his education. However he turned his back on abstract expressionism as he wanted to find his own style.
At the start of his career he paints extremely true to life to show off his artistic skill and establish him as an artist. He creates such realism in his work by his grid technique. He takes the photo of the subject he is going to paint and splits it into a grid and then draws out a larger corresponding grid on a canvas, this ensures everything will be in proportion and therefore true to life. Furthermore his work is made realistic through the use of shading in his painting to give the illusion of three dimensions rather than being a flat shape. You can see clearly on the skin the use of different tones and colours to create shadows and highlights which makes the skin look round and flesh like. Later in his career in the 60’s and 70’s he begins to experiment with colour, different media and techniques.
He begins to move away from photorealism and start to create the pixelated realistic images that he produces today. He further develops this after the accident and the colours and shapes used to create the portrait are looser.
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.
A review of 'Chuck Close: Recent Works' at Guild Hall Museum by the New York times argues against this however saying that his work has matured over time rather than being affected by his illness 'when you think of the “pugnaciously punk” young artist of the “Big Self-Portrait,” a persona Mr. Finch compares to the “urbane, successful New Yorker” in the self-portraits here, you see changes that probably have less to do with “the Event” and more to do with time and maturity. Change is not the hallmark of Mr. Close’s oeuvre, but this show demonstrates how, as with Piet Mondrian or Robert Ryman or Cindy Sherman — or any artist generally following a single path over the course of his or her career — shifts occur. For Mr. Close, these have to do with the relationship between photography and painting, but also with the way that digital media have altered our perceptions of time and the image — and ourselves.'
In conclusion if you compare Chuck Close with his work, you can see that both of them have gone through quite an impressive journey.
However some good points about my presentation is that my images were large, clear and correctly labelled with enough to engage the audience but not so many as to confuse them. I also spoke clearly and loudly.
