Chuck Close

Chuck Close was part of the photorealist movement of the 1960 with contemporaries including Richard Estes. They are considered by many to be partially responsible for the inclusion of photography into the contemporary art world due to the fact that they often used photographic stills as their subject matter. This is quite a departure from the days of ladies lying on chaise longues in artist’s studios. Chuck Close painted quite large shots of people’s faces in interesting ranges of emotion. He is also known for repainting, or recreating the same image several times.

When I was younger I was introduced to one of his self portraits which inspired me greatly. Then this year when a friend frantically called me and sent me videos from Art Basil fair in Miami showing me the same image, but not on a canvas. He had created a cylindrical mirror around which sand had been organized so that if you viewed the warped reflection it was the exact same self portrait I had seen as a kid. This man pushes himself to do different things, but he also seems to find challenge and interest in restraining himself to the same images.

These are the things he is known for, but not the thing that I find interesting about him in relation to the work I am currently doing. According to my research on en.wikipedia.org

he explained in a 2009 interview with the Cleveland Ohio Plain Dealer, he made a choice in 1967 to make art hard for himself and force a personal artistic breakthrough by abandoning the paintbrush. "I threw away my tools", Close said. "I chose to do things I had no facility with. The choice not to do something is in a funny way more positive than the choice to do something. If you impose a limit to not do something you've done before, it will push you to where you've never gone before."

I relate to this currently because I am trying very hard to push myself out of my comfort zone (ironically the zone of portraiture) and I have found that by imposing an order of operations to my work and using new and different tools I am finding the freedom he discussed in his comments that comes from taking away the ability to just keep doing the same thing in the same way.

I have always enjoyed his work on a purely aesthetic level ever since I was shown it by a painting professor at Towson University. Copying him was something that gave me a great deal of forward momentum in my early career. I found it shocking that something I was doing to move away from that stage in my career was exactly how he wound up making his body of work.