Chuck Close

Chuck Close (1940- ) American painter known for gigantic, close-up portraits based on photographs. Close’s portrait heads, which typically are about 3 m (about 10 ft) tall, expose every wrinkle and pore of his subject. He creates them by overlaying both his blown-up photographic source and his canvas with corresponding grids, and then, square by square, methodically transferring the image in the photograph onto canvas.

Close made his first photo-derived painting in 1966, and over the next few years he executed a series of huge black-and-white portraits. The grid system he used was standard practice for a group of painters known as photorealists. In 1970 Close began to paint color portraits, and in the next decades he moved from photorealism to a more abstract form of realism. For example, Close filled each unit of his grid with an impression of his own fingerprint, inked on a stamp pad, in Robert/Square Fingerprint II (1978, Collection Mr. and Mrs. Julius E. Davis). Dark fingerprints form the dark areas of the painting, while lighter, or partial prints make up the light areas. In the 1980s and 1990s, Close experimented further with the painted marks within his grids. Each square of these later grids contains what appears to be a tiny abstract painting, which may be composed of amoeba-like shapes in brilliant colors such as fuchsia, mustard, deep violet, and turquoise. When seen from a distance, hundreds of these colorful abstract shapes combine to form an amazingly detailed and photographically realistic portrait.

Fascinated by the detail and clarity of daguerreotypes, Close turned to this early form of photography in the 1990s and early 2000s. His daguerreotypes—8-by-10-in images on metal plates—consisted mainly of self-portraits and close-ups of nude figures.

Close was born in Monroe, Washington. He received a master of fine arts degree from Yale University in 1964 and studied in Vienna, Austria, from 1964 to 1965 on a Fulbright grant. He taught art at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst from 1965 to 1967 and then moved to New York City. In 1988 the collapse of a spinal artery left him partially paralyzed, and he began using a wheelchair. Close continued to paint with the aid of a hand brace and a custom-designed, motorized easel.