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CHUCK CLOSE
By Alex LukasPhotos By Adam Amengual
If you know what a Chuck Close painting looks like, you know what Chuck Close looks like. His dramatically over sized portraits, a large number depicting the artist himself, have been a staple in major museums since the 1970s. You can spot one from a mile away-a face staring straight at you, nine feet tall. His self-portraits have made Close one of the most recognizable living artists, but he doesn’t want you to get the wrong idea. “I just had a self-portrait retrospective travel around, and it’s just a nauseating number of images of me,” says Close. “I don’t think I’m as narcissistic and self-involved as it appears with all the self-portraits, you know.”
In 1988, long after his initial success, a spinal blood clot left Close partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. While he made a triumphant return to work, he also noticed a change in people’s response to him personally. “Before I was in a wheelchair, I was 6’3”. I very rarely got approached by people, and I suppose I was just too big or too unapproachable. Being put into the wheelchair sort of cut me down to size, and I think it’s made me far more approachable, so it’s interesting that people approach me all the time and tell me that my work has been important to them or that they have gotten pleasure from it, and you know it’s really nice. I don’t mind – I mean what could be better than to have people tell you what you do has meaning for them and has brought them pleasure? So, it’s been a benefit.”
American art was still reeling from Abstract Expressionism when Close was coming up as a young painter in the 1960s. “I’ve lived long enough to have painting be dead many times. Painting was dead; it was really stupid, and sculpture ruled. If you were going to make a painting, if you were stupid enough to make a painting, you for sure wouldn’t want it to be figurative, because that was even dumber yet. Clement Greenberg, who was the most important art critic at the time, made a pronouncement that the only thing you could not do anymore was paint a portrait.” Close took that as a challenge. “I thought, That’s sort of interesting. That means I’m going to have a lot of elbow room, I’m not going to have a lot of people competing with me, and I thought, Gee, that’ll push me out of the mainstream and into some other place.”
Depicting his subjects hyper-realistically and many times larger than life, Close quickly established his own, other place. Focusing equally on traditionally unimportant features such as skin, hair, and stubble as well as the eyes, nose, and mouth, Close both embraced and shrugged off the “dead” conventions revolving around portraiture, and wound up in brand-new territory. In addition to himself, his sitters ranged from strangers to family to young artist friends such as sculptor Richard Serra and composer Philip Glass. They weren’t supposed to be recognizable. “I was intent on just painting really anonymous people,” Close recalls. “Then they managed to become famous, and it kind of screwed up my game plan.”
Close’s paintings have relied heavily on the grid from the get-go, initially using the structure as a technique for transferring a smaller image to a large surface. Working from photographic reference to produce the clarity of detail he sought in his early work, Close began to introduce the structure of the grid itself into the painting. Filling each square with concentric rings of colors, shades of gray, patterns or fingerprints, the result can look a lot like what we might call “pixilation” today. “Painting my work came before the computer, before the digital images. I was making stuff that way, so, you know, they ripped me off.”
Being a technophobe, Close has resisted many of the ways in which technology could speed up his painting process, a painstakingly slow one. He often spends months and months working solely on one canvas, while at the same time collaborating with master printmakers to produce unbelievably intricate takes on his traditional painted portraits. One of the rewards of printmaking, to Close, is the opportunity it provides to show his process. His exhibitions often include his prints shown step-by step, revealing how the colors layer to create the final image. “I didn’t want to destroy the magic,” he says. “I still want to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but I don’t mind showing you how I did it.”
In the era when Chuck Close was figuring out his own solutions, he had the luxury of time to do it. When contrasting his development with the youth frenzied art world of today, Close views himself as lucky. “I’m just glad I came up when I did. I felt like I had my whole life to develop my voice,” says Close, who continues to create portraits today. “If you can back yourself into a corner that is of your own making, a problem that is personal to you, no one else’s answers will be applicable, nothing will be a good fit, so you are going to have to respond as an individual with your own solution to that problem.
“There may not be enough change for some people, but it feels like I’m still engaged. If it feels like the search is still on and I’m entertaining myself, I’d rather follow the trajectory that the work is going in naturally. Part of that is getting yourself in trouble and pushing things ‘til you up the degree of difficulty again where it doesn’t just happen automatically. That’s the fun part.”