Chuck Close (1940 - )

Chuck Close in known for his huge photorealistic paintings of closely-cropped faces. Though his
working methods and choice of media have changed over the years, he has largely persisted with
the same subject matter over just short of fifty years.

My research into Close’s work has been extensive and, I think, fruitful. There is an abundance of
reference material available. The main sources have been two recent biographies of Close by
Christopher Finch (one focussing on Close’s work, the other on his life), a publication accompanying
his 1998 retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Hayward
Gallery, London and a recent volume devoted solely to Close’s photography.

The approach I have taken to writing up this research is with an initial background to Chuck Close,
followed by sections that each address a pertinent question. Clearly this is not the format required
for a literature review in a thesis but I found that it helped me to focus on the issues most relevant
to my own practice.

Background

Chuck Close was born to working class parents in Washington State. Raised as an only child, he
struggled at school because of ill-health.

Close was afflicted by a neuromuscular disorder that caused muscle fatigue on physical exertion and
made participation in sporting activities impossible. Close recalls that this hindered integration into
his peer group and resulted in him developing talents as a magician in order to feel valued. Though
not directly relevant to his art Close is a confident, articulate and entertaining speaker: qualities
attributed by Close to his experience performing tricks to his school friends (Finch, 2010a:24-27).

Close also suffered from prosopagnosia. This is a rare condition in which sufferers have difficulty in
recognising faces. (Elsewhere I have discussed the importance of prosopagnosia in establishing
evidence for a discrete centre of the brain ascribed specifically for perceiving faces). It is frequently
asserted that Close’s choice of faces as subject matter derives from his prosopagnosia – that in order
to aid recognition of faces he had to study them closely, committing distinguishing features to
memory. Though having a compelling rationality, this explanation is not one that Close himself has
ever espoused.

Though unrecognised at the time, Close has an unusual type of dyslexia. In addition to the
difficulties in reading and writing that are typical symptoms Close’s form of dyslexia included an
ability to “mirror write”. Close considers both the way he works and his choice of subject matter to
be direct consequences of his dyslexia. In order to remember things at school he had to break
information down into bite-size chunks (Finch, 2010b:17). Such an incremental approach underlies
Close’s approach to painting.

Recognising his learning difficulties, Close’s father arranged private tuition in the one school subject
Close excelled at – art. But when aged 11, tragedy struck as Close witnessed the sudden death of his
father. At around the same time his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and Close himself
spent nearly a year in bed suffering from a chronic kidney infection.

Close pursued a career as an artist following school, graduating from the University of Washington
School of Art in 1962 and progressing to a Masters of Fine Art course at Yale University.

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In 1988 a spinal artery bleed resulted in almost complete quadriplegia. Following months in hospital
and a protracted period of rehabilitation he resumed painting from an electric wheelchair and a
brush strapped to his splinted right arm. Though there were profound personal consequences and
he now relied on assistance to help him paint, Close believes that paralysis did not cause any change
in his style ore approach (Finch, 2010b:191).

What caused Close’s interest in portraiture?

Close has never considered himself as a portrait painter. He had no interest in the history of
portraiture and considers his work to have more in common with abstraction than figuration (Finch,
2010b:191).

Throughout art school Close pursued an interest in figurative painting, though one that had little in
common with his subsequent work. This was the age of abstract expressionism and in an attempt to
fuse both abstraction and figuration he was preoccupied with painting what he describes as second-
rate pastiches of de Kooning (Finch, 2010b:23)

His first significant work, Big Nude, which measures over 24 feet long, was an attempt both to buck
the trend and stablish a niche of his own.

Big Nude, 1967. Oil on canvas, 116 x 253 in.

In Close’s own words:

“If you were dumb enough to make a painting, it had better be abstract. It was even dumber to make
a representational image. Then the dumbest, most moribund, out-of-date, and shopworn of all
possible things you could do was make a portrait. I remember Clement Greenberg said to [Willem] de
Kooning that the only thing you can’t do in art anymore is make a portrait. I thought, well, if
Greenberg thinks he can’t do it, then I am going to have a lot of operating room all to myself. But of
course, he didn’t consider Warhol a painter. [He] had been making portraits and was essentially a
portrait painter, if you think about it.”(Grynsztejn, 2005).

And, in an artworld that was becoming increasingly more sophisticated and that the public found
ever more difficult to comprehend or engage with, Close recognised that portraits would always be
attractive to the general public who were not cognisant of art trends (Grynsztejn, 2005).

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Close was intrigued by the likes of Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt whose work spread interest evenly
across the canvas or sculpture. All parts of the work had equal importance and every part was made
in exactly the same way. Close believed he could incorporate this concept into figurative work
(Storr, 1998a:89).

Frank Stella, Hyena Stomp, 1963 Sol LeWitt, Cubic-Modular Wall Structure, Black, 1966

Why close up paintings of heads?

Close’s choice of “heads” that has remained his main subject matter for fifty years was largely
serendipitous. After taking photographs from which to work on for “Big Nude” he found he had one
12-exposure role of medium-format black and white film left in the camera. He decided not to
waste the film so, there being no one else around to photograph, he put the camera on a tripod and
photographed himself.

Close had hoped that the scale of Big Nude would result in viewer’s attention being drawn to parts
of the body not normally noticed. He was disappointed as he felt gaze was inevitably focused on the
“hot spots” of the model’s pubis and nipples. It also had areas of the painting that were of no real
interest at all (Finch, 2010b:38). Concentrating on the head would help solve some of these
problems.

In full-face portrait format cropped at the collar bones, the shape of the head almost fills a
conventional vertical rectangular canvas. Whereas the components of the face (eyes, nose, mouth,
and ears) have a fixed relationship, the body can be arranged in an infinite number of ways. Painting
only the head would also emphasise the aspect of scale. He could make his painting so much larger
than real life (Finch, 2010b:43)

Phil, 1969. Acrrylic on Canvas’ 108 x 84 in. Joe, 1969. Acrylic on canvas’ 108 x 84 in.

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Why the ID-style pose?

Close’s subjects are portrayed face-on and unsmiling, akin to ID photographs on passports or
“Wanted” notices. This “disallows any but the subtlest of individual inflections" (Storr, 1998b:21).
They display no emotion either through facial expression or body language.

According to Close: “Well, the police have a reason they make a mug shot. It gives you the most
information about that subject that you can have. They want to find them and arrest them. And they
get them straight on, and they get a profile. All of my early portraits are dead-straight on”
(Grynsztejn, 2005).

And:

“Why can’t we reflect on less dramatic or less primitive situations? I’m interested in approaching the
subject flat-footedly, very unemotionally. Lack of highly charged emotion doesn’t mean no emotion.
It means that I’m not cranking it up for its maximal emotional impact” (Harshman, 1978).

“In every medium in which he has worked, including the daguerreotype, Close has attempted to
make his portraits as unassuming as possible. He has sought to reveal neither good character nor
bad, nor does he subscribe to the long-standing belief that portraiture can reveal character. To make
that clear, he referred to his paintings as “heads” rather than portraits early in his career”
(Westerbeck, 2014:26)

‘By refraining from moral or psychological commentary and by withholding personal sympathy, Close
has created a psychological zone where it is possible to violate the physical privacy of anther human
to an unprecedented degree’ (Storr, 1998b:52)

According to Christopher Finch, by “ignoring aspects of personality and character” Close’s work
provokes a “dynamic tension” in the viewer (Finch, 2010b:44). Such tension arises from the conflict
between the viewers innate need to gain information about the subject from the image of their face
when the clues needed to do such are absent.

One further advantage in having each subject adopt a similar emotionless pose is that this facilitates
comparison of features between different paintings without introducing confounding variables
resulting from the emotion or character of the subject.

How does he choose his subjects?

Close’s most used subject is himself. There are over thirty self-portraits in a variety of mediums. He
likes constancy in his work and has stated the only reason he uses other subjects is to prevent the
viewer becoming bored. This has nothing to do with ongoing psychological self-analysis and
everything to do with changing physical appearance (Storr, 1998a:79). He is fascinated to see how
his own face has changed over the years.

An indication of Close’s objectivity is revealed by his referring to the subject of the self-portraits as
“he” or “him” and not “I” or “me”. He uses the impersonal term “heads,” and (with the exception of
“self-portrait”) his work is titled simply by the first name of the subject and a number.

For the early part of Close’s career, he painted only himself, his family, friends or colleagues. Many
of his colleagues have since become famous but, until recently he avoided working with celebrities.

Historically most portraits are painted for the benefit of the sitter. They are therefore disposed to
make the sitter look good, important, wealthy, intelligent or whatever. Close has never painted

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commissions and therefore avoids a conflict of interest between artist and sensibilities of his sitters.
Close states ‘I tried to purge my work of as much of the baggage of traditional portrait painting as I
could’ (Nemser, 1970:53). In Close’s case, “the contract which exists between the painter and the
model is almost entirely on the painter’s terms” (Storr, 1998b:45). Apart from close family, none of
his subjects own the work (Wye, 1998:78).

Why does Close make works so large?

Since Big Nude Close’s paintings have been of heroic proportions. Size is intrinsic to the work.
Unlike billboards and cinema, perhaps the only other contemporaneous examples of large figurative
images, Close intends his work to be seen close-up. He wanted Big Nude be seen from close range
so the viewer would move their head across the image as if surveying a landscape through a
panoramic window (Finch, 2010b:34).

A further benefit for Close was that large works cannot be reproduced in print – you cannot
appreciate them fully through reproductions in books, you have to see the real thing.

Close draws the analogy between viewing his “heads” and exploring a landscape. “As visual
information… . It’s interesting how many critics and art writers over the years have used Gulliver as a
way to describe the work. They are landscape-like in the fact that they are traversed. It’s like all of
Gulliver’s Lilliputians crawling over the face of a giant, stumbling over beard hair and falling into a
nostril. There’s a physical, experiential aspect to it—almost like traversing a landscape. If you were
walking across a real landscape, you would come to a creek and you’d have to get across it, and then
you’d have to walk around stones. Your eye sort of does that… . I think of it as acreage—acreage that
happens to be a face” (Grynsztejn, 2005).

With an increase in size, features are exaggerated whilst being at the same time being accurate.
Robert Storr notes: “A meaty nose of normal proportions is a meaty nose; the same nose the side of
a small child is monstrous.” “Everything about these faces, from misshapen features to the smallest
blemish or lapse in grooming is recorded, inspected millimeter by millimeter by the artist, and blown
up to giant scale.” “The viewer is also drawn towards details that require stepping up to the canvas
to the point that other details move to the periphery of vision and begin to lose clarity along with the
overall coherence of the image” (Storr, 1998b:46-47).

Detail Big Self-Portrait, 1968. Acrylic on canvas, 107 x 83 in.

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In a more psychological vein Storr also notes “few of us are comfortable studying the subtler signs of
our own physical imperfection, aging, anxiety, or unhappiness that a prolonged and expressionless
gaze in the mirror returns to us” and “The solitary viewer, at liberty to examine his or her every
crease and follicle as if he or she were a laboratory specimen, is likewise predicated on a subdued but
powerful sense of mutuality”. “By refraining from moral or psychological commentary and by
withholding personal sympathy, Close has created a psychological zone where it is possible to violate
the physical privacy of anther human to an unprecedented degree. Once past this threshold, one
may wonder at their presence, speculate on their inner life, invent stories to explain how, warts and
all, they had earned the faces they so frankly offer to the world, or, observe with the innocent,
unapologetic avidity of the curious child the sheer marvel of strangers, though we, of course are not
innocent at all” (Storr, 1998b:52).

Storr also observes the apparent disparity between emotional detachment of Close to the subject
yet the intense intimacy with which he engages with the subject (Storr, 1998b:52).

According to Robert Hughes “Close’s works are among the most troubling icons of American art in
the ‘70s…Faces would look like this to a louse, if lice could scan them”’ (Hughes, 1977).

How important is the method used?

Commentators have stressed the overwhelming importance of “process” in Close’s work. Inspired
by the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, “process art” prioritised the method of producing the work
over the result obtained. Process artists known personally to Close included Richard Serra (whose
methods included throwing molten lead into the corner of a room) and Sol LeWitt for whom the use
of a grid structure underlay most of his work (Finch, 2010b:32-33):

Close painted “Big Nude” by drawing a grid on a photograph and sequentially copying each of the
1,350 squares of the photograph onto the canvas. The monochrome painting using oil paint took 10
weeks to complete. For his next major work, Big Self-Portrait, he refined his method further using
only black acrylic spray paint over a prepared white canvas. Using an airbrush to apply the paint and
a razor blade or eraser mounted on a power drill to remove excess, and laboriously building up layer
upon layer he “obliterated any trace of the stroke of a paintbrush and thus the work resembled a
photograph” (Storr, 1998a:87). Big Self-Portrait measured 107.5 by 83.5 inches and took four
months to complete. He made seven more black-and-white paintings in this period.

In 1970 he adapted the technique to replicate the dye transfer process of colour printing. Now
having to create the image using three colours (magenta, cyan and yellow) each painting took three
times as long to compete, i.e. an average of twelve months.

Close in his studio painting

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Close relishes the challenge of making his task difficult and the creativity this brings about. He
recalls a conversation with his contemporary Richard Serra who said “Making decisions as an artist is
the easiest thing in the world because the important thing to do is separate yourself from everyone
else. Certain decisions are more difficult than other decisions. Every time you come to a Y in the road,
one way to go is more difficult than the other. So you automatically take the difficult road because
everyone else is taking the easy road, and if you do that you will automatically put yourself out in
some field all by yourself” (Storr, 1998a:90).

Close himself stated “When you find yourself doing the same thing that you are good at, you have to
increase the degree of difficulty. I was very influenced by watching my grandmother crochet” (Sultan
and Westerbeck, 2014:125). And, explaining his decision to dispense with the paintbrush for Big
Self-Portrait: "I threw away my tools. 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." (Norman,
2009).

Hence according to Deborah Wye, “For Close the means of making the work seem to be almost more
important than the ends they achieve. At the very least they are clearly interwoven” (Wye,
1998:78)and for Christopher Finch, “the single premise that underlies all of his output, namely an
unwavering faith in process as a creative protocol” (Finch, 2010b:12).

Why does Close work from photographs?

There are many practical benefits from working from a photograph. The technique of
superimposing a grid over a scene and copying each square individually has been used for centuries
but actually drawing a grid over a photograph makes the process much simpler. And finding a
subject that would agree to posing for several weeks at a time would be difficult and/or expensive.

Painting from life involves either averaging the way someone looks or favouring one expression over
another (Sultan and Westerbeck, 2014:135). Painting from a photograph freezes the subject. Close
takes several photographs before choosing which one to work from.

Photographs are also permanent, and so can be worked from again at any time. Close will often
return to a photograph he used many years before, making a new work totally distinct from his first
painting. He has made more than 20 re-workings of the photograph for “Phil” since the original
painting in 1969 (Wye, 1998:78).

Four versions of “Phil”. Original acrylic on canvas, Fingerprint painting, Rubber stamp and Drawing

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Another aspect of the photograph that has fascinated Close since his original film for Big Self-Portrait
is the bokeh effect (in which a shallow depth of field renders some of the image out of focus). He
had not intended that the tip of his nose and his hair would be rendered out of focus but he liked
the effect and wanted to replicate it in his paintings to emphasise that this work was copied form a
photograph. In an interview with Colin Westerbeck he said he was “aware of how much of one’s
field of vision is out of focus when you’re looking at something close to you, like a human face” and
was frustrated by the way the unfocussed area came into focus when you tried to study it. “It was
very difficult to see what that blurriness was really like he complained but the camera nailed it down”
(Westerbeck, 2014:49).

Why Black-and-White?

Close believes his initial preoccupation with painting in black-and-white stemmed from studying art
books which at the time rarely included colour reproductions. He spent hours studying black-and-
white images with a magnifying glass (Storr, 1998a:87).

An unintended but advantageous consequence to using black-and-white was that it emphasised that
the work was a copy of a photograph (Finch, 2010b:35).

Close recognises different qualities in his black-and-white and colour paintings. “The black-and-
white heads are in your face. They have no frames to insulate them from the world. They are
hierarchical, and that’s due to the figure on ground being so emphatic because of the white
background. When you turn to the colour portraits, the backgrounds are tinted -greenish-gray in
some cases, a little warmer in others- which tends to emphasize the allover character of the
paintings, because every square inch, even when there seems to be nothing there, is activated by the
three layers of colour – magenta, cyan, yellow. If the black-and-white paintings are hierarchical, the
colour paintings are more wallpaper-ish” (Finch, 2010b:83).

Keith, 1970. Acrylic on canvas, 108¼ x 84 in. Linda, 1975-76. Acrylic on canvas, 108 x 84 in

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Christopher Finch’s compares Close’s black-and-white paintings with his colour paintings, having a
clear preference for the former over the first 20 years of Close’s oeuvre. “Seen today, when they
impress as much as ever, but astonish a little less, the black-and-white portraits have a kind of
classical gravity that derives in part from the fact that we perceive them in the context of black-and-
white photography, the chromatic constraints of which combine with its long history to invest it with
a patina of cultural weight and psychological significance. The impact of the full-colour photo-
imitative heads would prove to be somewhat different” (Finch, 2010b:76).

And: “A black-and-white photograph of a nude can transform the components of the body into an
almost abstract dialogue between intersecting planes rendered in terms of light and shadow, as in
the case of works by Edward Weston, for example. Photographed in colour, however – and even if
composed in the same way – a nude becomes a catalogue of pigmented information in which the
flesh tones predominate, conveying sensuality in chromatic terms. In the case of portraits, the
contrast is less pronounced, because a likeness is always a prerequisite, but the difference between
black-and-white and colour remains significant.” (Finch, 2010b:82).

Finch also believes the “secrets of the sitter’s character” are revealed more with colour than black
and white (Finch, 2010b:83).

Is Close a Photorealist?

Photography changed the course of art history. The invention of the photograph threatened the
future of painting and caused artists to seek more inventive means of expression. Hence a cat and
mouse game ensued whereby painting moved away from reality, becoming more about impressions
and movement and photographers wanted their photographs to become more “arty” and less about
simply recording reality (Sultan and Westerbeck, 2014:134).

Largely as a reaction to abstract expressionism, in the late 1960s a style of painting emerged that
aimed to make paintings that looked like photographs – photorealism. Close has often been called a
photorealist though he aggressively disputes this classification. At one time he refused to let his
work be hung in galleries that included photorealistic work (Storr, 1998a:90) and he has always
considered himself to be more philosophically aligned to non-representational artists (Storr,
1998a:91).

For the first 20 years of Close’s career his paintings differed from photorealism in just two ways.
First, in replicating the depth of field effects of a photograph he unashamedly referenced the
photographic origins of his work. Second, the scale of his work was far beyond that of the
photorealistic school. However, whilst understanding Close’s reluctance to be pigeonholed, it seems
to me that Close was the photorealist par excellence.

Robert Storr observes that “Aesthetically, no machine can complete with the nuanced decision-
making of the skilled artist, nor technologically can it produce a comparably high optical definition –
at least not in 1973. When a computer scans, squares-off, and synthesizes the information in a
photograph, that process involves not just mathematical reduction but qualitative degeneration of
that information. At best, what it delivers is a carefully edited but graphically impoverished copy”
(Storr, 1998b:48). Whether in 2017 photographs can combine detail with scale as in Close’s
paintings is debatable.

One aspect of Close’s technique that I have yet to find commented upon is his ability to “upscale” an
image. His paintings revealed more detail than was apparent in the photograph that he copied.

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How and why Close changed his style of painting.

In the late 1970s Close began changing his style of painting. Since then he has found new ways to
work whilst never abandoning older methods completely.

In 1980 he returned to using oil paint with his portrait, Stanley, that also revealed the grid.

Stanley, 1980. Oil on canvas, 55 x 42 in

Close was now substituting abstract for objective detail. Retaining the huge scale format, from
distance the newer work looked similar to the photorealistic work. But approaching the painting
revealed effects akin to pointillism (or even pixilation) with either dots painted with a substrate of
paper pulp or Close’s fingertips.

Georgia, 1982. Pulp paper collage, 48 x 38 in. Fanny, 1985. Fingerpainting, 102 x 84 in.

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Close experimented with changing the grid format from squares to diamonds and concentric circles
and by filling the grid with circles, lozenges and diamond shapes, the centres filled with different
colours.

Lucas II, 1987. Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 in. John, 1992. Oil on Canvas, 100 x 84 in.

There were even occasional deviations from the ID type format by painting a profile or an extremely
close crop.

Cindy II, 1988. Oil on Canvas, 72 x 60 in. Robert, 1997. Oil on Canvas, 102 x 84 in.

Close maintains that by changing his approach and reworking old subject matter in new ways he was
not trying to figure out “how many ways there were to skin a cat,” but rather was interested in
“seeing how subtle shifts in materials, devices, and attitudes can make drastic differences in how the
image is perceived” (Lyons and Storr, 1987:92).

“I’ve never had an ‘artist’s block’ in my entire career, never permitted myself to have one because I
never waited for inspiration, I never waited for the clouds to part and lightning to strike because I just

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kept altering the variables. I always had something else that I wanted to do, something else I wanted
to try, something I wanted to throw out, something I would put in. Well, it’s no accident that I ended
up with that freedom because the whole notion of inspiration and a masterpiece went out of the
window. The serial way of working in art meant that you just signed on and shipped out. You went
wherever it went, and there wasn’t going to be this ultimate or penultimate moment that summed
everything up” (Storr, 1998a:91).

Choice of medium

In the early 1970s Close began experimenting with printmaking. The decision was as much drawn by
financial imperatives as artistic considerations. He was, after all, still in his early career and taking
anything upwards of four months to complete a painting. Close also wanted to make his work
available to more people (Wye, 1998:79).

He uses various types of printmaking, lino-cut, mezzotint, screen-print, aquatint, etching,

Keith, 1972. Mezzotint Self-Portrait, 2001. Etching Self-Portrait, 2014. 84 colour woodcut

Close says that “The thing that is the constant surprise is how my multiple work informs my unique
work, and how the unique work then changes the prints. It’s a real conversation back and forth. It
just keeps going” (Wye, 1998:92).

Why did Close turn to photography as a medium in itself (as opposed to a convenient maquette from
which to make a painting?

Close first used a 24 by 20-inch camera (in effect a view camera fitted with a Polaroid back) at
Polaroid’s corporate HQ in Cambridge Mass in 1977. His intention was to use the photograph as a
maquette but he soon recognised the potential for creating works in themselves (Westerbeck,
2014:22).

In 1979 he produced his first major photographic work, Self Portrait/Nine Parts, which Christopher
Finch believes was “arguably a milestone in the history of photography” and “one of the seminal
photographs of the final quarter of the twentieth century” (Finch, 2010b:141). At that time there
was no large-scale art photography. “The nine-piece portrait was meant to be seen from close
proximity, and the shock value of the scale, combined with the fragmentation of the image and the

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merciless detail provided by the Polaroid system, was considerable. Fragmentation is particular
shocking when applied to the human face, especially since in this instance the edges of some sheets
actually slice through the eyes, metaphorically assaulting the very notion of vision. At the same time,
paradoxically, that fragmentation helps to emphasize the allover quality of that Close has sought in
all of his work. Each of the nine discrete sheets had an equal role to play in the work’s gestalt, so
that the camera’s mechanically generated illusion, which is aggressively present, is overlaid by, and
violently at odds with, a grid structure that is essentially minimalist” (Finch, 2010b:141).

Self-Portrait Composite Nine Parts, 1979. Nine colour Polaroids mounted on canvas, 83 x 69 in

By the 1980s Close had graduated to a 40 x 80-inch Polaroid camera then at the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston and used for archiving photographs of works of art. This was, in effect, a room-sized
box measuring 16 feet deep and 12 feet tall and wide. With no shutter, a piece of cardboard would
be moved to allow a powerful flash to illuminate the subject. The subject was effectively inside the
camera and the image was developed in 90 seconds (Finch, 2010b:143).

In 1984 he departed from his practice of seventeen years to produce five-panelled nudes. The
departure was in two ways – through reverting to full-body nudes and photographing models not
friends. They were 17-foot long. When he first exhibited them he insisted the gallerist constructed
a wall in front of the photographs so the viewer was forced to view them from close range (Finch,
2010b:146).

Laura I, 1984. Colour Polaroids mounted on aluminium, five panels, each 97 x 43 in.

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Finch believes his truncated triptych and diptychs of 1984 are his most successful photographs
because the joins transect the “hotspots” thus forcing confrontation with the viewer (Finch,
2010b:149).

Mark Diptych II, 1984. Polaroid Diptych 97 x 43 in x2 Laura Triptych, 1984. Polaroid triptych 97 x 43 in x3.

Close continued to photograph himself and friends, often presenting the work as diptychs combining
either black-and-white with colour, dark backgrounds with light backgrounds or profile with frontal
aspects.

In 2014 he abandoned his unwritten rule of not working with famous film stars to make a series of
Polaroids for Vanity Fair magazine. Though Close insisted his famous subjects could not be attended
by make-up artists or hair stylists and the nature of the process revealed a rarely-seen unretouched
image of the subject, this approach was by now not original.

Helen Mirren, 2014. Colour Polaroid, 24 x 20 in. Scarlett Johanssen, 2014. Colour Polaroid, 24 x 20 in.

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In 1995 Close began experimenting with daguerreotype. To begin with he took full-body portraits,
moving to “heads” once he had acquired the necessary high-powered flash to prevent motion blur
and reveal detail.

Though at to 8½ by 6½ inches daguerreotypes were miniscule in comparison to his other work, they
had one thing in common with his large paintings: they had to be seen in real life to be fully
appreciated. This was because of their distinct reflectivity that could not be replicated in
reproductions (Westerbeck, 2014:22).

Close says he has noticed that at his exhibitions viewers spend more time looking at the older,
flawed bodies than they do of the nude models with beautiful bodies (Finch, 2010b:286).

Untitled Torso Diptych, 2000. Daguerreotype. Self-Portrait, 2004. Daguerreotype.

It is noticeable that black skin tones appear to glow like bronze under the daguerreotype process.

Renee, 2000. Daguerreotype. Lorna, 2000. Daguerreotype.

The small size of daguerreotypes did not stop Close from using their scanned image as the as the
basis for larger work, notably in producing jacquard tapestries.

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 Self-Portrait Five Part, 2009. Jacquard tapestry, 79 x 229 in.

“I want to make ambitious photographs that reflect the same values and interests as the rest of my
work. I don’t see it as a lesser art form in any way, shape or form……. With photography, I am able to
move quickly….. I would rather have a thirty-second line drawing by Matisse than a Bouguereau. The
time spent making something is not what makes it valuable” (Sultan and Westerbeck, 2014:132).

Points of Interest

Close’s work is of particular interest because:

 his subject matter (ID style “heads”), his revelation of detail and the urge to view the large
works from close up to appreciate the detail are similar to mine
 his choice of models which (until his later work) was limited to friends and family (i.e. his
models were not chosen because of who they were or the way they looked)
 the interplay between photography and painting which resonates with the interplay
between drawing and photography in my own work. I.e. he makes paintings that look like
photographs, I make photographs that look like drawings
 the way his work has developed, largely sticking to the same ID format whilst exploring
different methods of working with the image (including multiple re-works of the same
image)
 that Close wants the viewer to see his work as if “surveying a landscape”. He frequently
uses the term “landscape” when talking about his work
 his desire (that he has undoubtedly achieved) to avoid categorisation and create a niche of
his own
 commentaries on his work could often apply to my own work
 the idea that imposing limits and restrictions on subject matter and working methods leads
to greater creativity
 that his entire process of working over 50 years seems to incorporate the essence of
“practice as research”

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References

Finch, C. (2010a) Chuck Close: Life. London: Prestel.

Finch, C. (2010b) Chuck Close: Work. London: Prestel.

Grynsztejn, M. (2005) Navigating the Self: Chuck Close discusses portraiture and the topography of
the face. Walker Magazine. [Online] [Accessed on January 21st, 2017]
http://www.walkerart.org/magazine/2005/navigating-the-self

Harshman, B. (1978) 'An Interview with Chuck Close.' Arts Magazine, 52(10) p. 143.

Hughes, R. (1977) 'Blowing Up the Closeup.' Time, 109(212) p. 92.

Lyons, L. and Storr, R. (1987) Chuck Close. New York: Rizzoli International Publications.

Nemser, C. (1970) 'An Interview with Chuck Close.' Artforum, 8(5) p. 53.

Norman, M. (2009) 'Contemporary Art Legend Chuck Close Talks About Painting.' The Plain Dealer,
(September 1st)

Storr, R. (1998a) 'Interview with Chuck Close.' In Storr, R. (ed.) Chuck Close. New York: The Museum
of Modern Art,

Storr, R. (1998b) 'Chuck Close:Angles of Refraction.' In Storr, R. (ed.) Chuck Close. New York: The
Museum of Modern Art,

Sultan, T. and Westerbeck, C. (2014) 'A Different Kind of Truth: A Conversation about Photography.'
In Chuck Close: Photographer. London: Prestel,

Westerbeck, C. (2014) Chuck Close: Photographer. London: Prestel.

Wye, D. (1998) 'Changing Expressions: Printmaking.' In Storr, R. (ed.) Chuck Close. New York: The
Museum of Modern Art,

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