Chuck Close

"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."

Chuck Close (1940) an American painter and photographer most famous for his large scale photorealist portraits. Close has a condition where he struggles to depict faces and significant features be between people, this is were his intrigue began.

Close has said, "I was not conscious of making a decision to paint portraits because I have difficulty recognising faces. That occurred to me twenty years after the fact when I looked at why I was still painting portraits, why which still had urgency for me. I began to realize that it has sustained me for so long because I have difficulty in recognising faces."

Close creates a grid like method and works from photos, coping his grip from his photo to his canvas, filling in each square with as similar colours as possible. Close usually paints into the squares in a ring like way. To create these super-real images. Close’s black and white canvases are hyper-real, he took four months to create a grayscale portrait of him self. Close when on to create several of these grayscale portraitists all in huge amounts of detail and very delicious brush marks. Close’s other portraits explore this coloured ring mentored. Using Close’s grid method again he splits the photo and his massive canvas into the same grid and using the colours in it paints in a ring like form, this creates the effect that the portraits look like they are behind belealed glass. 

 

Close’s portraitists interest me, as photorealist paintings are something that I find hard to create. However Close choices to paint like this as he found it hard and challenging, as he said in an interview in 1967 he chose to make art hard for himself. That is why I find his work inspirational. I am hoping to do a few large scale drawings of people that I spent my summer which will be framed and hanging in my window, I also hope to explore his style of work using which he uses colour in a form on grid then ringing the colours. His painting like this are very beautiful as the coulors are so bright and bold. 

After trying to create a drawing in Close's hyper realistic style I found it extremely challenging, like Close I found realistic drawing really difficult. I decided to do a gray scale drawing of Bob Marely as Close also does famous people, as I listened to a lot of Bob Marley over the summer, I though he was the most relevant famous person to draw.  

I hope to incorporate Close work into my final out come, I am planing to do a set of drawings of people that I spent my summer with. I'm going to challenge my self my doing a set of drawings as I find this tequnece the most difficult, in some I would like to explore Close's use of a grip method and his use of colour.