chuck close

With the initiation of this blog and diving into more time intensive art projects, I swung by the library to get some motivational reading material. I wikipedia-ed (?) an article on portraiture and compiled a list of artists to study and decided to start modern and work my way back.

First on my list was Chuck Close.

his 1968 self-portrait

I'm really still digesting Close's work even though I have been familiar with him for over ten years now. What is interesting here are probably the similarities (and great differences) in our work. I would say to the untrained art appreciator, that our styles and approaches are very similar, however our underlying motivation for portraits are polar opposites. Chuck Close was a revolutionary artist, not just for what he created, but for what he overcame. Personal disabilities throughout his life shaped how he painted. I have a great appreciation for what he was able to do in spite of those limitations. His approach however, stems more from a rebellion to the art of the day which happened to be during the peak of abstract expressionism. So how does one counter abstract expressionism... with realism, of course. The timing was right for him to re-introduce representational works, but what made him successful was his acutely academic reasoning behind it, and his ability to assimilate the natural progression of innovative artistic thought prevalent in that time to his approach. He wasn't simply painting realistic portraits to be contrarianistic, he was making a much more specific commentary on perceptions and interpretations of mechanical processes and the way they shape how we read visual images. This is related more specifically in his work to photography and the way it shapes our understanding of two dimensional data. This may sound boring, but it resonated affectionately with artists of the time.

his self-portrait 1997

I loosely quote one curator's response to Close: "He's so smart, why is he making these ridiculous paintings?" Academically speaking, Close had considered every element of his process, product, and how it should be interpreted and viewed so thoroughly, that he almost justified his own credibility despite what he may have produced. The fact that paintings with this amount of precision and on this scale had never been attempted before is secondary to how he decided to approach them to begin with.

In relationship to my own work, I feel that my interest started from a technical standpoint, and is evolving into one more interested in creating a successful portrait, ie making a portrait that the subject will appreciate. I'm trying hard to avoid things now such as, "Do I really look like that? Is my [body part] really that big, small, round, etc" and less interested in the reaction to the technical precision. I think my work is more successful when striving for high rendering, however that is more of the path (that works well for me) to get to a final result rather than an end result on its own.

Even though I may still have mixed reactions to his work, the goal of motivating me to continue my own work by researching Chuck Close was a success.