Initial Impulse For Close's Art example essay topic

"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. Not the least with character. Their eyes don't contact the viewer, they look right through you.

They were as anti cosmetic as mug shots. And it's interesting that Close's heads, then and later, work best when they are either strictly frontal or in profile; any turn or tilt of the head, suggesting that the sitter has noticed you, weakens the image (Hughes 215). "The paint Close applied was molecule-thin, spritzed on the painstakingly prepared gesso surface with an airbrush, in strict accordance with the grid to which Close enlarged the original photo" (Hughes 215). His attention to detail suggested an obsessive involvement on his part. Yet this detail managed to keep the viewer distant, with nothing sensuous about his work to hook onto. The idea of photo quality paintings was circulating around the art community at this time, but no one took it to the level that Close did or with the same effect.

The effects of his early works are lost in reproduction; the images shrink back to being just another photo and their grasp on your attention vanishes. Only from the originals can one begin to understand what Close means when he says in a catalog interview with Robert Storr, that "I wanted to make something that was impersonal, arm's-length and intimate, minimal and maximal, using the least amount of paint possible but providing the greatest amount of information possible" (Hughes 215). From black and white, Close moved to color, but again in an almost obsessive compulsive way. "Color printing is done with three colors: cyan, magenta and yellow. Close took his photo, had color separations made and then proceeded to render each square of the canvas with each of the colors, successively, exquisitely controlling the amount of each hue per pixel.

There was a yellow face, then a blue overlay and then with the magenta one-presto, full exact color" (Hughes 216). There was no room for deviation or correction. "Paint by numbers raised to the nth degree. It goes so far out in the direction of illusion that it hits abstraction coming back" (Hughes 216). At what point does an array of colored squares in a regular grid turn into a recognizable image? The question touches on the mystery of Realist painting.

"How it is, for instance, that when looking up close at a Velasquez you see a flurry of gray and pink spots and streaks, and when you move back a couple of feet, that same patch has become a glistening silver embroidery of rose velvet" (Hughes 216). All of Close's faces call on this effect. "The brain seeking illusion in pattern, questing for clues" (Hughes 216). Close breaks down a face into dabs of oil paint, spots of pastel, even textured papier-m^ach'e glued on top of one another. All of these techniques to create the same final outcome, a piece of art that is unmistakably a face.

As he advanced with age and most likely reflected on his tragic stroke which left him in a wheelchair, his works became richer. Detailed as usual but in a different way, his later works are a far cry from his earlier air brushed pieces. The various print techniques offered Close the opportunity to devise new conceptual systems, which are at the heart of his artistic achievement. For him, creating an artwork, a painting, a drawing or a print meant isolating visual problems that needed solving. "Rather than depending upon a romantic notion of artistic inspiration, Close formulated a plan that can be broken down into manageable parts" (Wye 71). These parts when pieced together one day at a time eventually make a whole.

The path to this whole provides a variety of new sub problems that in turn need breaking down (Wye 71). While all new mediums provided Close with fresh possibilities, printmaking did so to the extreme. "Each technique, whether mezzotint, etching, spit-bite, aquatint, woodcut, linoleum cut, lithography, or screen-print, as well as handmade paper and woven fabric, initially seems impenetrable, but ultimately becomes a locus of inquiry and ideas" (Wye 72). Yet, in 1972, when publisher Robert Feldman of Parasol Press asked Close to undertake his first print project, he was not eager to accept. As an art student in Yale University's graduate program, he had been an assistant to the distinguished printmaker Gabor Peter di and knew enough to be wary. Close saw only the obstacles that would keep him from his painting rather than possibilities that would fuel his creativity (Wye 72).

"It is clear that the methodology of printmaking is grist for Close's conceptional mill and that it serves to further his artistic aims" (Wye 80). But his artworks created in multiple editions also fulfill another function, a social function that provides more viewers with access to his art. "Close points out that his slow rate of production has determined his total oeuvre at only about sixty of seventy paintings" (Wye 82). While rarity was never his intention, very few people or institutions can own one of his works because there are so few to be had. Close knew that most people experience art through reproduction. "Yet, if you don't have the physicality of the piece, you " ve got only the barest sort of notion of what the work is really about" (Wye 82).

Printmaking provided the opportunity to have his art collected. "But I knew early on that I wasn't interested in a reproductive method of printmaking. I didn't want prints to be some throw away, signed, poster ized reproductions that stood for me and my work. I was committed to making things that engaged me in the same way, with the same interest in process, the same intensity, the same commitment of time and whatever else is required with the unique works". (Wye 82) While portraiture was not the initial impulse for Close's art, it undeniably captured his attention.

He constantly shot portrait photographs and accumulated many more subjects than he has actually painted. Sometimes he photographed someone with little interest in the subject. Seeing the results of the photographs, Close wanted to work immediately with the image. At other times he was anxious to have a certain person sit for one of his works, but then the face just didn't seem right as a photograph (Wye 78).

When grouped according to sitter, Close's prints offer a clear opportunity to focus on the effects of his technique as shaped by the artist. He has said: "It's an entirely different way of thinking and looking from technique to technique. You cannot go directly to what you want, you have to go some odd, eccentric route to get there. The route you take is a large part of the experience for the artist and vicariously for the viewer". In the end, prints in each technique have "a different spirit because of that engagement".

(Wye 79) Close has compared working with the same sitters in different techniques to translating ideas into different languages, with the same subtle nuances of meaning and syntax required. Interpretations then change further as the viewer becomes a partner in what Close characterized as the "performance" enacted in the use of each technique (Wye 79). Close's own face has always been a readily available subject and over the years he has created over thirty self-portraits in a wide variety of mediums. He has also had the opportunity to rephotograph himself.

The different photographs have been used as different starting points. One might interpret this use of his own face as a means of ongoing psychological self-analysis, but Close states that he has not knowingly used his image for such probing. What he has noticed about himself is not the level of emotional insight but on the level of appearance. He saw himself aging; as he puts it, "I watch my hair disappear" (Wye 79). "I almost wish I had decided that, say, all prints were going to be self-portraits, or something like that.

Just so that for that entire body of work, one constant would always be there". But, he adds, "that probably would have been nauseating... that many Chuck Closes". However, a comparison of the "Self-Portrait" prints provides a telling series of distinct relationships between depicted subject and working process, with the tension between the two giving each work part of its vitality (figs. 1, 11-16). The huge screen-print (fig. 15) offers a world composed of layered, flat strokes and shapes, each with varying opacity. Here, part of the grid that fills the background is complex and active in itself, as, of course, is the section devoted to the figure; individual components of both background and foreground become enveloping when one stands near this large scale print.

Nevertheless, the size and boldness of the figure allow its own presence to assert itself (Wye 79-80). The activeness of the background grid, in effect an environment of art surrounding and at times competing with the sitter, is found to some degree in all the Self-Portrait prints shown here, with the exception of the linoleum cut (fig. 16). There the focus is solely on the head and its placement on the sheet which, due to its size and probable eye level hanging height, confront the viewer almost as a mirror. The layering of muted colors creates an inner glow counteracting the eerie effect of the hundreds of tiny rounded shapes that, together, assemble the face and call attention to the laborious carving required (Wye 80). Chuck Close has accomplished something that many artists never achieve; fame, recognition and acceptance from a community that most often criticizes.

His work is a reflection of a man changing and growing over time. Starting off by airbrushing emotionless photo real faces, Close then tried new styles of working and changed his painting and print techniques to keep up with an always evolving art world. His clean "image", combined with the fact that he over came paralysis from the neck down, makes him a hero for all. Chuck Close's faces have made an everlasting impact on the art world and will continue to do so for as long as art is created. Hughes, Robert.

"Close Encounter". Time. 13 April. 1998: 213-216. Wey, Deborah. "Changing Expressions: Printmaking".

Chuck Close. Ed. Robert Storr. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998.