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CHUCK CLOSE - ART THREAD.


High Priest

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Little History:

He was big and clumsy and not very athletic. Because he was dyslexic, everyone considered him dumb and lazy. He was told to forget about college. He couldn't play sports because he couldn't keep up with his friends.

 

But that wasn't the only pain Chuck Close had to deal with in his young life. His father, a sheet metal worker, plumber and on-the-side inventor, was always in ill health and moved the family from Monroe to Everett to Tacoma to Everett in search of civil service jobs with health benefits.

 

When Close was 11, his life became pure hell. His father died. His mother, a trained pianist who in the Great Depression gave up her aspirations for concert career, got breast cancer. They lost their home because of medical bills. His grandmother was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. And Close, an only child, spent most of the year in bed with nephritis, a nasty kidney infection.

 

One thing did help him cope with the mind-numbing agony, sadness and misery: art.

 

He always liked to draw. At age 4, he knew he wanted to be an artist. At the age of 5, his dad made him an easel for his birthday and got him a set of oil paints from Sears. In an attempt to win friends and "get kids to be around me," he also did magic and puppet shows. He drew and painted. People noticed.

 

Little did Charles Thomas Close know back then that he would indeed to go to college, graduating not only from the University of Washington in 1962 (magna cum laude) but from Yale as well. Now, at the age of 57, he is one of the true superstars of art. His works hang in the world's most prestigious museums, he is considered by ARTNews magazine to be one of the 50 most influential people in the art world--and he is so big he turned down a major retrospective at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art because promises were broken. He chose the Museum of Modern Art instead. No one can recall an artist ever turning down the Met.

 

But this is much more than just the story of a local boy who made good. On Dec. 7, 1988, at the age of 49, Close was at the height of his career as a portrait painter when he was stricken with a spinal blood clot that left him a quadriplegic. Many thought his career was over.

 

As he came to grips with life in a motorized wheelchair, unable to move from the neck down, with little hope for improvement, his biggest fear was that "I was not going to make art. Since I'll never be able to move again, I would not be able to make art. I watched my muscles waste. My hands didn't work."

 

But like the previous tragedies in his life, that didn't stop him either. He not only returned to painting, but with a new style that has kept his place as one of the great American painters of our time. This month he will receive a new honor to add to the mantle of his Manhattan home--he becomes the 1997 UW Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus, the highest honor an alumnus of the University of Washington can receive

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...those things are all about ten feet tall...i've always thought that one of teh craziest things about close it that he works his canvases from right to left, top to bottom of a grid pattern...each square getts finished completely before he moves on to the one next to it...also each of those large black/whit painings has only one teaspoon of black paint...

 

...and he's really a robot...

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Originally posted by GamblersGrin

rent/watch/buy "chuck close: a portrait." it aired on pbs a few years back. i taped it. its soooo good.

 

My class watched it a few years back.. really good, i dont remember if it covered the tech. he uses when it comes to doing his woodblock carvings, but his work is well beyond the majority of artist's being pushed by large gallerys.

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i didn't know he used airbrush until i read something in art in america about only using a teaspoon or tablespoon of black paint for his 8-foot-tall canvases. i suppose that's not entirely rediculous seeing how you have to dilute it but he's amazing nonetheless. he does fine touch up work such as chin hairs/head hairs and eyelashes and crap with a razor blade. this guy's work is beautiful. huge fan.

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Originally posted by High Priest

If your into his work you might (if you dont already) have an interest in Alex Ross. He did the "Kingdom Come" story for D.C. and works in a similar fashion.

 

alex ross is insane. kingdom come was a great graphic novel. is it me, or does the look of sky captian and the world of tomorrow have a similar look (lighting, etc...)

 

chuck close is off the hook (yeah i said off the hook). anyone catch his cameo in the movie adaptation of 6 degrees of seperation?

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Originally posted by some pittsburgh flavor

i didn't know he used airbrush until i read something in art in america about only using a teaspoon or tablespoon of black paint for his 8-foot-tall canvases. i suppose that's not entirely rediculous seeing how you have to dilute it but he's amazing nonetheless. he does fine touch up work such as chin hairs/head hairs and eyelashes and crap with a razor blade. this guy's work is beautiful. huge fan.

 

...i've never heard anything about an air-brush before...i was always under the impression that he used brushes...he uses little amount of paint because everything is put on very thin with small brushes, one square at a time...when you look at them up close they are remarkably flat...there is little to no texture at all...

 

 

**...ok i just did some research (good old internet...cradle of knowledge)...he did do work with airbrush...i really had no idea...

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Originally posted by seeking

not to hate, but if those things are really 10 feet tall, it is basically physically impossible for them to be painted with only a teaspoon of black.

 

really dope work though.

 

...ok i did exaggerate (...how the hell do you spell that?) a little...they're about six feet tall...and they are done with only about one spoonfull of black acrylic paint...it's put on almost as smooth and thin as water color...

 

...if you haven't seen his work in person, you really should...it's amazing...most major contemporary collections have at least one of his pieces...

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seeking: i read in an interview he did that it was a tablespoon, and that's simply for the black and white photorealistic ones. you wouldn't be able to use pure acrylic paint in an airbrush... when i use acrylic in an airbrush i use maybe 1/8 teaspoon of paint per glass jar container thing and the rest is diluted with water. so i mean, it's superhuman but feasible if you're chuck close. and if you look at the paintings there really isn't any area of pure black. it's all this matte diluted greyish tone you'd get when using something like india ink, as you would with any diluted black color in an airbrush

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