Chuck Close :: essays research papers

Chuck conclusion (born 1940) is an American photorealist specializing in close-up portraits and self-portraits. snug is one of the very few in advance(p) realists or photorealists who focus on the human face. In 1988, in mid-c beer, Close was paralyzed due to a blood clot in his spinal column. He regained partial use of his arms, and was able to return to painting aft(prenominal) developing techniques which allowed him to make from a wheelchair.All of Closes croaks are based on photographs he takes himself. Close always follows the same guidelines in planning a painting. The source photograph is a tightly cropped orchestrate and shoulder shot. The subject is a family member or friend. The finished work is always titled by the subjects first construct alone (with the exception of Self-Portrait). This decision was intended to project an aura of anonymity, allowing viewers to approach the work without preconceived ideas about the sitter.Closes working mode is extremely labor- intensive. He begins by dividing his source photograph into a gridiron and creating a corresponding grid on the canvas. He then meticulously transcribes the image onto the canvas square by square, proceeding from the top left over(p) to the bottom right. Some of the largest canvases contain thousands of squares Close completes all of his paintings by hand. wedded the painstaking nature of this work, some of the earlier large-scale paintings took up to fourteen months to complete.Closes work falls into two periods, the early and the middle, in which he is directly fruitfully engaged. It is easy to divide the two periods on either aspect of Closes 1988 stroke that left him unable to hold a brush. (He paints with his brush fix to his hand by a metal and Velcro device.) Close started to work with bolder, more expressive and colorful marks before his great physiologic trauma. The bare-assed work is both the same theyre recognizable as kit and caboodle by Close and could be by no one else He still uses the grid and he still paints heads. Although the amount of information the new pictures carry is less than the old, the characters depicted seem warmer, more immediate, and more exuberant.Closes repertory of marks has changed dramatically. In place of the discreet dots and miniature strokes of his early work, non to mention the pictures constructed of fingerprints he made in the early80s, each of the enlarged squares in the new grids contains colorful, painterly marks that function as mini- abstract paintings of their own.