Chosen Artist Research - Chuck Close

Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close was born July 5, 1940 in Monroe, Washington. He is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist. A spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralysed, but he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by the entire art world. Close suffers from a facial recognition disorder (prosopagnosia), meaning that when he sees someone's face, he will not recognise them again, even if he sees them every day. Somehow the features of the face do not fit together as they should but are percieved as different organisms. Close may recognise someone from their body language or unique scent, but he has trouble remembering them by facial recognition techniques, as is usual for the overwhelming percentage of the population. Close says "I was not conscious of making a decision to paint portraits because I have difficulty recognizing faces. That occurred to me twenty years after the fact when I looked at why I was still painting portraits, why that still had urgency for me. I began to realize that it has sustained me for so long because I have difficulty in recognizing faces." By painting portraits he is able to hold on to the face in his mind easier, and recognise the person.

Although his later paintings were created using a different method from his earlier canvases, the preliminary process remains the same. To create his grid work copies of photos, Close puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell. Usually each square within the grid is filled with rough regions of color (usually painted rings) which give the cell an overall hue which makes sense from a distance. His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. His first picture with this method was Big Self Portrait, a black and white enlargement of his face to a 2.73 m by 2.12 m canvas, made in over four months in 1968, and acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1969. He made seven more black and white portraits during this period. He has been quoted as saying that he used such diluted paint in the airbrush that all eight of the paintings were made with a single tube of mars black acrylic. Later work has branched into non-rectangular grids, topographic map style regions of similar colors, CMYK color grid work, and using larger grids to make the cell by cell nature of his work obvious even in small reproductions. The Big Self Portrait is so finely done that even a full page reproduction in an art book is still indistinguishable from a regular photograph.

On December 7, 1988, Close felt a strange pain in his chest. At that moment he was due at a ceremony honoring local artists in New York City and was waiting to be called to the podium to present an award. Close delivered his speech and then went across the street to Beth Israel Medical Center where he suffered a seizure which left him paralyzed from the neck down. The cause was diagnosed as a spinal artery collapse. Close called that day "The Event". He has relied on a wheelchair since. Astonishingly, however, Close continued to paint with a brush strapped onto his wrist with tape, creating large portraits in low-resolution grid squares created by an assistant. Viewed from afar, these squares appear as a single, unified image which attempt photo-reality, albeit in pixelated form. Although the paralysis restricted his ability to paint as meticulously as before, Close had, in a sense, placed artificial restrictions upon his hyperrealist approach well before the injury. That is, he adopted materials and techniques that did not lend themselves well to achieving a photorealistic effect. Small bits of irregular paper or inked fingerprints were used as media to achieve astoundingly realistic and interesting results. Close proved able to create his desired effects even with the most difficult of materials to control.