Chuck Close is an American artist and photographer. He is famous for his huge Photo-realist portraits and self- portraits. He often uses a photo of a person as the initial source for his portraits. The artist usually makes his canvases through a grid system each square of which corresponds to the pixel on the reference photo.
Background
Chuck Close was born as Charles Thomas Close on July 5, 1940, in Monroe, Washington, D. C., United States. He is a son of Leslie Durwood Close and Mildred Emma Wagner.
Close’s parents were both related to art and encouraged their son to pursue his artistic journey. So, Leslie Durwood, talented in craftsmanship, created the first easel for his son. Close’s mother was an accomplished pianist who never fulfilled her musical career because of the financial problems. However, she did everything to develop the artistic mind of Charles pushing him to a variety of extracurricular activities and by hiring private art tutors.
Since the childhood, Chuck has had some health problems, in particular, dyslexia, facial blindness and neuromuscular condition.
Chuck Close made a strong decision to become a painter when he explored the abstract art of Jackson Pollock at the age of fourteen.
Education
Chuck Close received his first painting lessons from the private tutors hired by his mother.
In 1958, he entered the Everett Community College where he spent two years.
Then he studied at the University of Washington School of Art in Seattle from which he graduated in 1962 with the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After, he attended the Yale Summer School of Music and Art which helped him later to enter the Yale University School of Architecture.
Close received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1963 and the master’s degree a year later. Among his fellows were such artists as Nancy Graves, Brice Marden and Robert Mangold.
The Fulbright scholarship the young artist received on his senior year gave him an opportunity to develop his artistic skills in Europe. In particular, Close studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1964 till 1965.
Besides, Chuck Close obtained four honorary degrees. They include the Doctor of Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago (1992) and from the University of Massachusetts (1995), the Doctor of Humane Letters from the Skidmore College (1992) and finally the Doctor of Fine Arts from the Colby College (1994).
Chuck Close started his career in 1965 from the teacher’s post at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where he had his first solo exhibition presenting to the public full-frontal nude male images made in the Pop-art style among other paintings, drawings and reliefs. The fact provoked the discontent of the administration and in 1967 the artist ended his service in the institution.
The autumn of the same year, he occupied the similar post at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He spent there four years.
Close continued to experiment with the contemporary art styles and by using photography, elaborated his famous grid technique due to which he managed to create grid-like replicas of the portrait pictures. One of the early examples of such photo-grid artworks were his abstract and figurative ‘Big Nude’ of 1967 and ‘Big Self Portrait’ of 1968. The following year, the latter painting was admitted to the Walker Art Museum which thereafter bought more of his canvases, like the portrait of composer Philip Glass in 1969. One of his creations was included in the list of the Whitney Annual Exhibition as well.
The same year, the artist began his collaboration with Bykert Gallery which helped him to take part at his debut group show in New York City along with such artists like Lynda Benglis, David Paul, and Richard van Buren. The collaboration had lasted for five years.
The first solo show in the city was organized with the help of the Bykert Gallery in 1970 when Close became an art teacher at the New York University. He devoted three years to this job.
At the beginning of the new decade, Chuck Close started to produce his first prints made on mezzotint, as he did with the earlier gridded picture of Keith Hollingworth. The result of the above-mentioned experiment pushed the artist to reproduced the same pictures using various techniques and media, which included fingerprinting, pulp paper and resourcing snapshot Polaroid photos. One of his early prints was demonstrated at the Museum of Modern Art during the ‘Projects’ exhibition of 1972.
In five years, he joined the Pace Gallery based in New York City which has represented his art since then.
The last year of the decade, the artist participated at the Whitney Biennial and the following year he returned again to the Walker Art Center presenting his portraits there. By the 1980s, Chuck Close’s photo-portraits became more abstract.
Suffering from the neuromuscular condition since the childhood, the artist had lived a spinal artery collapse in 1988. As a result, his body part below the neck became paralyzed. Due to the physical therapy and to the help of his wife, Close developed enough movement in his arms to continue painting activity with a brush fixed on his wrist although he has relied on a wheelchair since then. The artist is helped by his studio assistants.
Since 1999, Close’s art has been represented by the White Cube gallery in London, United Kingdom.
During his career, Close has presented his artworks in more than 150 personal shows, including the exhibitions and retrospectives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Blaffer Gallery of the University of Houston, the Queen Sofía Museum in Madrid, the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia and elsewhere. Moreover, the artist participated at about eight hundred group exhibitions, including a couple of Documentas V and VI (1972 and 1977), three Venice Biennale (1993, 1995, 2003) and the Carnegie International (1995).
Nowadays Chuck Close lives and works in New York City. One of his recent personal exhibitions took place in 2018 at the Leslie Sacks Gallery in Santa Monica, Caifornia.
Chuck Close is an accomplished artist who made a great contribution both to the development of the Photorealism and portraiture by successfully uniting his passion for the photography with painting activity. The techniques resulted from this combination influenced the development of the ink jet printer.
Close’s painting style can be seen in the artworks of Jennifer Bartlett, Cindy Sherman, Annie Leibovitz, Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Andres Serrano, and Robert Mapplethorpe.
During his artistic journey, Chuck Close received many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the National Endowment for Arts fellowship.
Chuck Close’s personality and career inspired moviemakers and other artists to dedicate their works to him. So, Close was a central figure of a documentary called ‘Chuck Close: A Portrait in Progress’ by a moviemaker Marion Cajori (1998), and the art critic Christopher Finch from the United Kingdom wrote a biography of the artist composed of two books, ‘Chuck Close: Work’ (2007) and ‘Chuck Close: Life’ (2010). The composer Philip Glass dedicated one of his musical piano compositions to Close in 2005.
Chuck Close’s artworks are nowadays preserved in many international galleries and museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London and others.
Moreover, his portfolio of twenty Polaroid portraits of movie stars was featured in the 20th Annual Hollywood issue of the Vanity Fair magazine in 2014. The musical 2016 album ‘Stranger to Stranger’ by a singer and songwriter Paul Simon was covered by the musician’s portrait made by Close.
Chuck Close’s art is very popular among the art collectors. His piece called ‘John’ was purchased by the Broad Art Foundation for $4.8 million at Sotheby's in 2005.
In 2012, Chuck Close’s print collection depicting the President Barack Obama was sold at the fundraiser to support the Obama Victory Fund. Later, the artist sold some of his artworks to support the funds campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore.
Views
Quotations:
"Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble."
"A face is a road map of someone's life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there's a great deal that's communicated about who this person is and what their life experiences have been."
"Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style."
"What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look."
"A photograph doesn't gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It's frozen. You can use it, then recycle it."
"Always the best time to paint is when people decide that painting is dead because the traditions and conventions are up for grabs."
"I always thought that inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. You sign onto a process and see where it takes you."
"I realized that to deal with your nature is also to construct a series of limitations which just don't allow you to behave the way you most naturally want to behave."
"I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have."
Membership
Associate Academician
National Academy of Design
,
United States
1990
Full Academician
National Academy of Design
,
United States
1992
President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities
,
United States
2010 - August, 2017
Personality
Despite his activity as an artist, Chuck Close is also known as the active participant at the community service.
The artist donated some of his works to various cultural organizations and foundations, including the public library in Monroe, Washington (‘Self Portrait’) in 2002 and the New York Stem Cell Foundation.
In 2013, Close participated at the Barack Obama's Turnaround Arts initiative which main goal was to ameliorate low-performing schools by the involvement of the students to the art.
Physical Characteristics:
Since the childhood, Chuck Close has had some health problems, in particular, dyslexia, facial blindness and neuromuscular condition. Since 1988, the artist's body part below the neck has been paralyzed as a result of the spinal artery collapse.
Connections
Chuck Close was married twice. On December 1967, his first wife became Leslie Rose, his former student. The couple produced two daughters named Georgia Molly and Maggie Sarah. Chuck and Leslie divorced in 2011.
Two years later, Close married the artist Sienna Shields. They later broke out.
