Chuck Close Style of Art in a Self Portrait

"I'k pre-pixel. They got information technology from me."

ane of 11

"I realized that to bargain with your nature is as well to construct a series of limitations which just don't allow you to behave the way you lot nearly naturally desire to conduct. So, I found it incredibly liberating to piece of work for a long time on something fifty-fifty though I'm impatient. It did not seem similar such a dichotomy or a denial of who I was. It seemed like I was taking intendance of who I was."

ii of 11

"Photography is the easiest medium with which to be only competent. Most anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to accept a signature style."

3 of 11

"I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to retentivity. I have face blindness, and in one case a face is flattened out, I can remember it better."

4 of 11

"E'er the best time to pigment is when people make up one's mind that painting is dead considering the traditions and conventions are up for grabs."

5 of eleven

"I always thought that inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show upwards and get to work. You sign onto a process and run across where it takes you."

6 of 11

"What divergence does it make whether y'all're looking at a photograph or looking at a however life in front of you? You still have to await."

7 of xi

"Y'all don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today yous will practice what you did yesterday, and tomorrow yous will practice what you did today. Somewhen you will get somewhere."

8 of 11

"A photograph doesn't proceeds weight or lose weight, or modify from being happy to being sad. Information technology's frozen. You lot tin can use it, so recycle it."

ix of 11

"Ease is the enemy of the creative person. When things become too like shooting fish in a barrel, you're in trouble."

ten of 11

"A face is a route map of someone'south life. Without any demand to amplify that or draw attention to it, at that place'due south a great deal that's communicated near who this person is and what their life experiences accept been."

11 of 11

Summary of Chuck Close

Chuck Shut is globally renowned for reinvigorating the art of portrait painting from the late 1960s to the present day, an era when photography had been challenging painting'due south former dominance in this area, and succeeding in steadily gaining critical appreciation as an artistic medium in its ain correct. Close emerged from the 1970s painting move of Photorealism, too known as Super-Realism, but then moved well across its initially hyper-attentive rendering of a given discipline to explore how methodical, organisation-driven portrait painting based on photography'southward underlying processes (over its superficial visual appearances) could suggest a wide range of artistic and philosophical concepts. In improver, Close's personal struggles with dyslexia and afterwards, fractional paralysis, take suggested real-life parallels to his professional discipline, as though his methodical and yet also quite intuitive methods of painting are inseparable from his own daily reckoning with the body'southward own vulnerable, material condition.

Accomplishments

• Photorealist painting of the 1970s celebrated the glossy, mirror-like "look" of the photo, but later on achieving that ideal, Shut swiftly turned to portraiture, suggesting it equally a ways for exploring unsettling aspects of how cocky identity is ever a composite and highly synthetic, if non ultimately conflicted fiction.
• Shut'due south dependence on the grid as a metaphor for his belittling processes, which suggest that the "whole" is rarely more (or less) than the sum of its parts, is a conceptual equivalent for the photographic camera'south analytical, serial approach to whatever given subject field. Every street-smart, colorful Polaroid is as much a time-based and fragmentary gesture as whatever more laborious stroke of the painter'southward brush in the cloistered studio.
• Close has worked with oil and acrylic painting, photography, mezzotint printing, and various boosted media. Shifting confidently from i to the other, Close suggests that his conceptual intentions are ultimately timeless, whereas his tools or materials are infinitely interchangeable. This is partly why Shut's exercise of portrait painting has for over 40 years remained surprisingly "contemporary," even while the larger move of Photorealism, his earliest called stylistic idiom, has long receded into history.
• Close's ho-hum, accumulative processes, which enlist numerous abstract color applications in the service of producing "realistic," or illusory portraits, nearly recently finds application in the art of mod tapestry via a highly illusionistic, reckoner-aided method of industrial weaving that Close favors for its ability to suggest the hyper-existent advent of 19^th century glass photographs(daguerreotypes).

Biography of Chuck Close

Describing how, "I discovered well-nigh 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to brand a specific recognizable person," Chuck Shut pioneered Photorealism. "By putting lilliputian marks together," he said his monumental portraits conveyed how, "a face is a road map of someone's life."

Important Art by Chuck Shut

Progression of Fine art

1967

Big Nude

"Big Nude" is the offset painting completed in Close'due south signature grid process, and both its size and cocky-conscious title bespeak its ambitious nature. Although the transferred image "reads" as a flat transcription of light and dark characteristic of a photograph, the painting's variegated brushstrokes reveal Big Nude to exist more than of a prototype for future evolution than a fully resolved picture. Poised precariously between a common studio exercise in figure drawing and a 1960s girlie magazine shoot, "Large Nude" also challenges the hereafter of representational painting at a moment in history when the genre would seem to have long ago exhausted its potential for hereafter development. Simply the clarified whiteness of the canvas hints at a new approach to the figure that might perfectly marry an instant, unforgiving photographic record of a subject with the artist'south reconsideration of its every component over months of studied, methodical transcription.

Acrylic on canvas - Collection Jon and Mary Shirley

1967-68

Big Self-Portrait

The tentative air of experimentation that might exist said to characterize Big Nude is nowhere apparent in Big Self-Portrait, a watershed painting that virtually showcases Close'southward unique method. Abandoning the full-trunk view, Close turned to one of the oldest traditions anywhere in art history, the cocky-portrait. Close had partially set out to refute the critic Clement Greenberg's claim that it was impossible for an "advanced" creative person to work in portraiture. Closes's untraditional approach involved conceiving of and creating a unique kind of "mug shot," a black-and-white idiom that exacerbated the subject'south blemishes and the original photographic baloney caused by the camera. The devotion to the thought of an unsparing, head-on view led him to pass up all commissions, as Shut used merely his own "mug" and that of close friends for his subjects.

Acrylic on canvas - Walker Art Heart, Minneapolis

1970

Kent

For Kent, Close fabricated apply of preparatory drawings for the beginning time to explore the three-color process, an faux, or re-employment, of the photographic dye-transfer method. By adopting a mechanical process and mimicking it physically, or by hand crafting what is normally carried out by the camera, Close suggests that illusion is ultimately in the center of the beholder, whose own optical apparatus finally "completes" the pic. Although Close literally painted the same image three times, one atop the other in separate colors, he was surprised when the work concluded upward taking iii times as long to complete. In social club to facilitate the process, Close wore cellophane filters over his eyeglasses in order to view marks in i colour at a time.

Acrylic on canvass - Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

1972

Keith/Mezzotint

The large format of Keith, although non nearly as large as Shut's earlier portrait paintings, did not interpret well to the outdated mezzotint process. Due to its gradual erosion, the plate made simply x good prints, and the surface coloring is noticeably lighter in the middle around the sitter's nose. The mezzotint printmaking procedure yields a soft, light-infused surface, here seen to best effect in Closes's rendering of the sitter'south hair. The random furnishings typical of printmaking inspired Shut to experiment further with various media.

Mezzotint - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

1985

Fanny/Fingerpainting

Shut's enjoyment of the physical interaction between artist and material gave him a particular affinity for working in the fingerprint method. Criticized by some as a kitschy version of an art already informed by Pop, the unsophisticated technique, so reminiscent of child's play, seems doubly appropriate for this informal, even so subtly monumental portrait of the artist's grandmother. The numerous, private touches of oil pigment gradually creating the appearance of supple mankind lends to the painting a sense of intimacy so advisable to the underlying relationship between artist and his chosen discipline.

Oil-based acrylic on canvas - The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

1997

Self-Portrait

Chuck Close'southward work is most frequently associated in the popular mind with his own likeness. Although it has been called by the creative person largely for the sake of convenience, Close'south self portraits provide an interesting arena for gauging the development of his thought and piece of work over four decades. The insouciant stare of the beau in Big Self-Portrait makes a striking counterpart to the stolid, knowing gaze of the older Close as represented in this cocky-portrait of 1997. Indeed, the comparing illustrates the evolution from fledgling artist to international icon. Compared to the earlier work, the 1990s Self-Portrait also shows how abstraction has come to play a more prominent role in Closes'south portraits. Each of the private units of the grid is a miniature abstract painting unto itself, comprising a panoply of colors and shapes that seem to have jumped directly to the canvas from the artist's palette.

Oil on canvas - Private Collection

2006

Andres

In recent years, Shut has extended his investigations into diverse media to the ancient genre of tapestry, the repetitive and episodic weaving procedure in many ways paralleling his ain painstaking juxtaposition of diverse colors in much of his portraiture. Using computerized photograph transfers of glass daguerreotypes (for blackness-and-white versions) or Polaroid snapshots, the tapestry medium is ideally suited for Close'southward interest in large-calibration work that nevertheless depends on pinpoint-like precision. Here, a portrait of artist-colleague Andres Serrano, notorious for his irreverent Piss Christ (1987) photo that continues to roil conservative Christians, beams triumphant from the weave, which is deftly composed of numerous threads of diverse colors intertwining with such precision that the human eye is virtually seduced into believing that this is a real human pressing his confront to a window.

Jacquard tapestry - PaceWildenstein Gallery, New York

Similar Art

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced past Artist

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  Alex Katz

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  Philip Drinking glass

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  Ross Bleckner

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  Philip Glass

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  Christopher Finch

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Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors

Edited and published by The Fine art Story Contributors

"Chuck Close Creative person Overview and Analysis". [Cyberspace]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by The Art Story Contributors
Edited and published past The Art Story Contributors
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Outset published on 01 Aug 2011. Updated and modified regularly
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