Chuck Close the photorealist painter passed away on 19th August, 2021.

Self-Portrait/Diptych, 2005, Two color Polaroids mounted on aluminium. 261.6 x 203.2cm

Chuck Close the seminal photorealist painter

Photorealist painter “Chuck Close, a Photorealist painter who earned acclaim for his incisive portraits has died at 81. Pace Gallery, which represents him, said on Thursday, 19 August, that he had died after a congestive heart failure resulting from a long illness.

Close’s large-scale painting of his artist colleagues, celebrities, politicians, and others in his orbit have been widely exhibited. They are considered key examples of Photorealism, a style associated with the late 1960s and early ’70s that involves the incorporation of photography into the painting process to create a more precise image. 

For Close, photography initially offered him the ability to remove his own subjectivity from the painterly process. “The camera is not aware of what it is looking at. It just gets it all down,” he told Artforum in 1970. “I want to deal with the image it has recorded which is black and white, two-dimensional, and loaded with surface detail.” But he was quick to point out that he was “not trying to make facsimiles of photographs.”

In Close’s works from the 1970’s gigantic likenesses are rendered with photographic precision. Often black-and-white and made by overlaying a grid on a photograph translating each square to a canvas, allowing viewers the chance to scrutinize every blemish visible on each of his subjects. He continued this technique, pixelating the image even as his later more freeform works.

Bob and the National Gallery of Australia

Bob, 1969-1970
acrylic on gessoed canvas
108.25 x 84 in. (275 x 213.4 cm

Chuck Close became well known in Australia during 1977. One of his seminal works Bob (1970) one of a series of eight large black and white portraits that Close painted between November 1967 and April 1970. was one of the earliest works purchased by the Australian National Gallery, now the National Gallery of Australia under the Directorship of James Mollison. This was an important early acquisition of the NGA and as such was included in the first NGA touring exhibition  —  Genesis of a Gallery, 1976-77', no cat. no. (ill.).

Like all the black and white heads, Bob is painted from grided photographs onto a gessoed ground using black paint applied with an airbrush to build up the dark tones. White paint is used occasionally for the highlights but more often the black pigment is scraped back using a razorblade or an electric eraser. The subject of the painting is one of Close's friends, Robert Israel, a New York based opera designer.

He said of the work; “I had taken a break and was walking back into the studio. Looking at the painting, I realised that a highlight in one of the eyes was too bright. And I said, 'Damn it, now I'm going to have to take his glasses off'. But when I realised what I had said, I pivoted on my heel and walked out leaving the lights on, the compressor on and the airbrushes full of paint. When you start believing in your own illusion, you're in serious trouble.”

At much the same time that Close was working on the painting Bob he made a film portrait of Israel, Slow Pan/Bob 1970 (16mm, black and white, 10 min. duration), in which the slowly moving camera minutely scrutinised areas of the sitter's face. The photograph used by Close for the painting Bob was used again in 1973, when the artist made a series of four pencil and ink drawings.5

Michael Lloyd & Michael Desmond European and American Paintings and Sculptures 1870-1970 in the Australian National Gallery 1992 p.408.

To construct his portraits, Close made sure that he worked in a way which differed from most painters in the U.S. He relied on very little paint and enlisted unconventional materials, like razors and airbrushes, in his process. 

Charles Thomas Close was born in 1940 in Monroe, Washington. At a young age, he began to suffer in school; only later on did he realize that it was because he had dyslexia, which at the time was not a disability that many were aware of. He found that he could excel as an artist, however, and his parents fostered that interest.

Close’s artistic breakthrough came at a young age, when he saw a Jackson Pollock painting at the Seattle Art Museum. “I was absolutely outraged, disturbed,” Close told the Brooklyn Rail in 2008. “It was so far removed from what I thought art was.” He later attended the University of Washington in Seattle as an undergraduate and Yale University as a master’s student. At Yale, Close worked alongside Richard Serra, Jennifer Bartlett, Brice Marden, and Nancy Graves, all of whom came to define the New York art scene alongside him during the ’70s.

Some have considered Close’s works to be related to his prosopagnosia, a condition more commonly known as face blindness. Though he initially did not intend his works to aid in his attempts to remember faces, he later realized that his painting practice helped. “I can remember things that are flat, which is why I use photography as the source for the paintings. With photography, I can memorize a face,” he told the artist Lisa Yuskavage in 1995.  

The 1980’s and beyond – less structure and colour

Georgia/Collage, 1982
paper pulp collage on canvas
48 x 38 in. (121.9 x 96.5 cm)

“Painting is the perfect medium and photography is the perfect source, because they have already translated three dimensions into something flat. I can just affect the translation.”

During the ’80s, Close switched up his working methods, resulting in images that looked less like their photographic sources. For one 1982 portrait of his daughter Georgia, for example, he pushed paper pulp through cake decorators. Colour, too, was added to Close’s paintings in this era.

Bill, 1990
oil on canvas
72 x 60 in. (182.9 x 152.4 cm

Self-Portrait/Pulp, 2001
stenciled handmade paper pulp in 11 grays 
57.5 x 40 in. (146.1 x 101.6 cm)

In 1988, Close suffered a collapsed spinal artery that left most of his body paralyzed, Through rehabilitation, he regained his ability to paint by using a brush-holding device strapped to his wrist and forearm.

Adding to his traditional work, beginning in 1991, he continued his examinations of portraiture through productions of silk tapestries and, since 2003, has furthered this investigation, producing editions of large-scale Jacquard tapestry portraits.

Self-Portrait I, 2011
oil on canvas
36 x 30 in. (91.4 x 76.2 cm)

In 2013, Close was told he had Alzheimer’s disease, and in 2015, that diagnosis was changed to dementia. With the prospect of his nearing passing, Close began to paint more self-portraits. 

“I always have at least one self-­portrait in each show, but usually no more than one,” he told the New York Times Magazine in 2016. “And then, with the last show, there were a lot of self-­portraits, and I’ve only done self-portraits since then. I think I’m having a conversation with myself. Facing death, or whatever the hell it is. I think it comes out of my diagnosis and not knowing how long I have.”

 He moved to New York from University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1967. There he taught at the School of Visual Arts, where he met his first wife, Leslie (nee Rose), Close and Leslie divorced in 2011, and he married the artist Sienna Shields in 2013; they separated two years later. 

He is survived by his daughters, Georgia and Maggie, from his first marriage, and four grandchildren. 

 Chuck (Charles Thomas) Close, artist, born 5 July 1940; died 19 August 2021

For more information:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/aug/20/chuck-close-obituary

https://nga.gov.au/international/catalogue/detail.cfm?IRN=37305&SiteID=1

http://chuckclose.com