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Chuck Close, A Man with many styles
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“I am not trying to make facsimiles of photographs. Neither am I interested in the icon of the head as a total image. I don’t want the viewer to see the whole head at once and assume that that’s the most important aspect of my painting. I am not making Pop personality posters like the ones they sell in the village. That’s why I choose to do portraits of my friends – individuals that most people will not recognize. I don’t want the viewer to recognize the head of Castro and think he has understood my work.” Chuck Close In the late 1950’s and 1960’s there was an art movement in the United States that changed the way Americans viewed art. This movement was called Pop Art. During this time, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning helped put America in the spot light within the art world. A spin-off of Pop Art was a small movement called Photo Realism. This small movement is where Chuck Close made his mark in the art world. While attending Yale University, Close was enraptured by the work of Willem de Kooning. He loved the color and luscious paint surfaces that de Kooning created. Close realized that this style couldn’t be imitated; no originality could come of it. Close however, in his contemplative way hungered to create in his own work the senses that de Kooning used in his. He began to do this before he suffered a stroke in 1989 which left him paralyzed from the neck down. Amazingly, after a partial recovery he continued to develop his style (Hughes 214). Close’s reputation as a hard working, insanely focused, all around good guy of the American art world gathered strength for years, especially after his stroke, when he had to learn to paint all over again from a wheelchair. He has become something of a legend. None of this bears on the quality of his art, of course. But one almost can’t help reflecting while looking at his laborious portraits, that sheer determination is the common factor of both Close’s art and his life (Hughes 213). His works are of immense size, most of which measure eight or nine feet high. His early works show one vastly enlarged face after another. “They are elaborated into a moonscape of pores, wrinkles, blackheads, stubble and multiple highlights” (Hughes 213). The faces which Close painted are of his friends and fellow artists. He didn’t want the viewers of his work to be distracted by famous or recognizable faces. He never painted a commissioned work of art; he only painted those he chose. It is well known that Close used friends, family members and personal acquaintances as the sitters for his works but that he does not accept portrait commissions. While he had been tempted at times to do so, for instance when a friend might request it. But Close maintained his original stance against this practice, concluding that exceptions would lead to confusion about the intent he had of his art (Wye 78). He began his big faces in the 60’s, working directly from black and white photographs he took himself. The results were very strange. The images weren’t “expressive.” Their obsession is with an overload of fact.
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