Chuck Close biography

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Close began taking art lessons as a child and at age 14 saw an exhibition of Jackson Pollock's abstract paintings, which helped inspire him to become a painter. He studied at the University of Washington School of Art (B.A., 1962) and at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture (B.F.A., 1963; M.F.A., 1964), and in 1964 he won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Vienna. While teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1965–67), he gradually rejected the elements of Abstract Expressionism that had initially characterized his work.

Close's first solo exhibition included a series of enormous black-and-white portraits that he had painstakingly transformed from small photographs to colossal paintings. He reproduced and magnified both the mechanical shortcomings of the photograph—blurriness and distortion—and the flaws of the human face: bloodshot eyes, broken capillaries, and enlarged pores. To make his paintings, Close superimposed a grid on the photograph and then transferred a proportional grid to his gigantic canvases. He then applied acrylic paint with an airbrush and scraped off the excess with a razor blade to duplicate the exact shadings of each grid in the photo. By imposing such restraints, Close hoped to discover new ways of seeing and creating.

Throughout his career, Close continued to concentrate on portraits—from the neck up—based on photographs he had taken. In addition to self-portraits, the portraits were usually of friends, many of whom were prominent in the art world. These images represent a very human, flawed view of the subjects, given the scale of attention given to imperfections, while also presenting a rather grand, iconic view of the sitters, given the monumental and confrontational quality of the works. During the 1970s and '80s, Close began to use colour and to experiment with a variety of media and techniques. One technique involved simulating the printing process: he used only cyan, magenta, and yellow and applied one layer of colour at a time to the canvas. He developed one of his most innovative techniques for his “fingerprint series,” in which he inked his thumb and forefinger and pressed them to the canvas to achieve a subtle range of grays. Viewed up close, the whorled patterns of his fingerprints can easily be seen; from a distance the method is unidentifiable, and the fingerprints combine to create