chuck close

Life and work

Most of his works are very large portraits based on photographs (Photorealism or Hyperrealism technique). In 1962, he received his B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle. He then attended graduate school at Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1964. After Yale, he lived in Europe for a while on a Fulbright grant. When he returned to the US, he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts. In 1969 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial. His first one man show was in 1970. Close's work was first exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art in early 1973.

To create his grid work copies of photos, Close puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell. 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 107.5 in by 83.5 in (2.73 m by 2.12 m) canvas, made in over four months in 1968. 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.

Close has often returned to the same photos to paint over and over again with different techniques. One photo of Philip Glass was included in his black and white series in 1969, redone with water colors in 1977, again redone with stamp pad and fingerprints in 1978, and also done as gray handmade paper in 1982.

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.

In 1988, Close had a spinal artery collapse, on the day he was to give a speech at an art awards ceremony. He felt ill beforehand, gave his speech, then painfully went to a hospital across the street. A few hours later he was a quadriplegic.

Close continued to paint with a brush held between his teeth, creating mini-portraits in grid squares created by an assistant. From a distance, these squares appear as a single, unified image. Eventually Close managed to recover some movement in his arm and legs, and now paints with a brush strapped to his hand. Close's work titled Kiki, completed in 1993, took about four months to complete.

Close currently lives and paints in Bridgehampton, New York.

Some of his subjects

• Richard Serra
• Nancy Graves
• Philip Glass
• Cindy Sherman
• Alex Katz
• Kate Moss