Painter, born in Monroe, Washington, USA. He studied at the University of Washington School of Art, Seattle (19602), Yale University (19624), and in Vienna, Austria (19645). A photo-realist painter of large portraits, as in Phil (1969), he was based in New York City from 1967, and taught at several universities. Paralysed from the neck down in 1988, he taught himself how to paint using mechanical and electronic aids.
Chuck Close (born July 5, 1940, Monroe, Washington) is an American photorealistic painter.
Life and work
Most of his works are very large portraits based on photographs (Photorealism or Hyperrealism technique). When he returned to the US, he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts. In 1969 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial. Close's work was first exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art in early 1973.
To create his grid work copies of photos, Close puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell.
Close has often returned to the same photos to paint over and over again with different techniques.
Later work has branched into non-rectangular grids, topographic map style regions of similar colors, CMYK color grid work, and using larger grids to make the cell by cell nature of his work obvious even in small reproductions -- the Big Self Portrait is so finely done that even a full page reproduction in an art book is still indistinguishable from a regular photograph.
In 1988, Close had a spinal artery collapse, on the day he was to give a speech at an art awards ceremony.
Close continued to paint with a brush held between his teeth, creating mini-portraits in grid squares created by an assistant. Eventually Close managed to recover some movement in his arm and legs, and now paints with a brush strapped to his hand. Close's work titled Kiki, completed in 1993, took about four months to complete.
Close currently lives and paints in Bridgehampton, New York.
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