Throughout his four decades as an artist, he has often taken as his subject self-portraits, and has continually found ways to approach these in a fresh manner and with astonishingly dramatic results. His process, evolution, methods, and media are at times as visible and central to the finished work as are his subjects.
In many ways, Close’s art is about the art of painting itself. At other times, he destroyed the concept of the grid entirely, or played with the visual results of a grid by tilting it on a diagonal. Using his fingers, scraps of paper, an eraser mounted on a drill, even an airbrush, Close meticulously recreated photographs on his canvases, often replicating each dot on an enormous, oversized grid. Instead of the smallest of brush strokes, his works were often created from rough strokes or even small pieces of paper that developed into the whole. What I was trying to do with these paintings was to make a big, aggressive, confrontational, knock-your-socks-off image from a distance that was also extremely intimate…." He succeeded in doing just that.Īs his career progressed, his methods and media changed. In Close’s own words: “As I was growing up in the '40s and '50s, paintings got bigger, the marks got bigger, the brushes got bigger, and yet the part-to-whole relationships stayed the same…. His works were made of infinitesimally small brush strokes that created a detailed image with a photographic realism. In response to the dominant Abstract Expressionist ideologies of his day, Chuck Close sought to obliterate the brush stroke rather than to exalt it.
Exhibition: Chuck Close Self-Portraits 1967-2005
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