Chuck Close

Chuck Close was born in Monroe, Washington in 1940. He graduated from the University of Washington (BFA, art) in 1962 and from Yale (MFA, art) in 1964. He was the 1997 UW Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus - the highest university honor for one of its graduates.

Chuck Close is one of the world's leading modern artists and is best known for his large-scale portraits of friends, fellow artists and often himself, produced at a very large scale. His work (especially his early work) is considered hyper-realism or photorealism. Close refuses to do commissions.
In the 1980s Close hit the big time, becoming a celebrity, partying with the Clintons at the White House and Andy Warhol.Time magazine and other national publications covered his shows and his work was displayed at the Museum of Modern Art and other top venues.

Close typically begins with a photograph of a face, creating a painting or print through a complex grid-based reconstruction of the image that he accomplishes by hand through a variety of techniques such as creating pictures from pixilated dots, pulp paper, finger painting and fragments of Polaroid close-ups.
His paintings are even more impressive, given that Close had to relearn how to use his hands at the age of 48 following a 1988 spinal-column blood clot that left him a quadriplegic. Close refers to this episode in his life as 'the Event', after which he learned to paint from a wheelchair and devised a mechanical system to lower and raise his canvases into a slot in his studio floor.

Close has lived life with a number of ailments including learning disabilities such as dyslexia and a condition called prosopagnosia, which makes it difficult for him to recognize faces. Ironically it is this condition that influenced him to paint portaits;

'Because in real life if you move your head a half an inch, to me it's a whole new face I've never seen before. But if we flatten it out -- I have and I take photographs -- I work from photographs and make flat things called paintings and prints. I have virtual photographic memory for anything that is flat, so it's not an accident that I only do images of people who matter to me -- family, friends, other artists. There are no commissioned portraits. These are images that really matter, and I want to commit them to memory and the only way I can really do that is to flatten them out, scan them, make these drawings and paintings and prints. And then they enter my memory bank in a different sort of way'. (source: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2010/07/conversation-chuck-close-christopher-finch.html).

Close's work is included in the collections of numerous museums, including the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), and the Tate Gallery (London). The New York Museum of Modern Art held a special exhibit of Close's paintings and prints in 1998; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held an exhibit on Close's prints in 2004. In 2010, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts held an exhibition presenting two dozen works by Chuck Close spanning a thirty-five year period from 1974 to the present.

Chuck Close lives in Bridgehampton, New York and is represented by the Pace Gallery, New York.

http://www.chuckclose.coe.uh.edu/

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