Chuck Close: Triumph and Adaptation in Photorealism

764 Words2 Pages

Chuck Close, born July 5, 1940 is an American painter who became famous as a photorealist, through his massive scale portraits. Chuck often paints abstract portraits, which hang in collections internationally. Although a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors. Chuck also creates photo portraits using a very large format camera.Chuck Close is noted for his highly inventive techniques used to paint the human face. He rose to fame in the late 1960s for his large-scale, photo-realist portraits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close. Chuck Close worked in many different types of artwork. The main type of artwork …show more content…

His first thought was how am i going to begin painting again? "I remember saying 'you see, I told you I can't do it' with tears running down my cheeks,”http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-30723575. But as he began to get back some strength through daily rehabilitation, Close was able to put his hands together, clamp them around a paintbrush and literally fall onto a canvas, hoping the brush landed in the right place. "It was good enough, even with the first attempt to know that I could do it eventually," http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-ouch-30723575. By the time he left the hospital he was creating painting just like he did before he was paralysed. Chuck was given a brace that helped him grip the paintbrush and after he left he was painting again. Chuck close also had another disability called Prosopagnosia which is also called face blindness. This disability left him not recognising his friends and family. He often kept pictures of them. In an interview, Close also discusses how these portraits are the result of taking individual pieces of information to make a whole a rather good definition of mosaics. Thinking of his work in mosaic terms is almost automatic. There is the tessellation of same sized segments and he does create the texture and reflectivity found in mosaic materials in those exquisite details of circles and lozenge shapes. It’s as if Close creates a visual code of dots and dashes in sequences

Open Document