Chuck Close

Chuck Close (Charles Thomas Close), 1940-, American painter, b. Monroe, Wash., grad. Univ. of Washington (B.A., 1962), Yale Univ. (B.F.A., 1963; M.F.A., 1964). After studying in Vienna (1964-65), he moved (1968) to New York City. Since then Close has specialized in huge, coolly expressionless single portraits of his artist friends, himself, or his family, executed from his own photographs in painstaking detail on a grid of small squares. His first works were painted in black and white; he introduced color in the 1970s and 80s. In 1988, Close suffered a collapsed spinal artery, which left him almost completely paralyzed. A brace device on his partially mobile hand, a sophisticated wheelchair, and other aids allowed him to paint again, and in the 1990s his work became freer and more lively. Within the armature of his grids, each tilelike square is filled with swirling, warmly multicolored designs in various forms-X's, O's, concentric rings of ameboid shapes, and others-in closeup resembling tiny abstract paintings, but at a distance coalescing into monumentally frontal portrait heads. From the 1970s to the present, Close has also created a variety of multiple images in such media as mezzotint, aquatint, linoleum cut, woodcut, screen print, paper pulp, and daguerreotype.

Bibliography: See The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close in Conversation with 27 of His Subjects (1998); J. Guare, Chuck Close: Life and Work, 1988-1995 (1996); studies by C. Westerbeck (1989), R. Storr et al. (1998, repr. 2002), and T. Sultan (2003); M. Cajori, dir., Portrait in Progress (documentary film, 1997).

Close, Chuck (1940– ). American painter. He was born in Monroe, Washington, and studied at Yale University, graduating in 1964. His early work was Abstract Expressionist, but he soon turned to Superrealism, becoming well known for huge portrait heads, seen frontally like gigantic passport photographs—his self-portrait (1968) in the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, is almost 3 metres high. Originally he worked in black-and-white, but in about 1970 he turned to colour. He works from photographs, dividing them into a grid and then transferring the grid to the canvas. In some of his later work he has deliberately emphasized the grid, creating ‘low resolution’ images resembling a computer scan or a face seen through frosted glass. Most of Close's portraits depict friends, but he says he regards the human figure as a ‘source of information', rather than a vehicle for ‘outworn humanist notions'. In 1988 Close was partly paralysed following an injury to a spinal blood vessel, but he resumed painting with the aid of a brace support on his wrist.