Up Close

“I never back up.”

“In life,” says Chuck Close, “you can be dealt a winning hand of cards, and you can find a way to lose, and you can be dealt a losing hand and find a way to win. True in art and true in life: you pretty much make your own destiny. If you are by nature an optimistic person, which I am, that puts you in a better position to be lucky in life.” 

Chuck Close is the world’s most famous living portraitist, and he knows a thing or two about bad luck.

His paintings are unmistakable. He starts with a photograph of a face and then blows it up, placing it on grid that can be as large as eight by nine feet--or even larger. He then dices the imag into hundreds, even thousands of three-inch squares.
Then he painstakingly transfers by paintbrush the colors in each square onto his huge canvases. Up close (so to speak), the face dissolves into blobs and dots of pointillist color, but at a distance, the likeness is precise, yet fragmented, pixelated, and, yes, distorted, almost like a stone mosaic made out of paint or a face seen through a rain-streaked window.

In his early years, his works were utterly merciless in their photorealism, showing every tiny hair and deformity.

“I deconstruct”

“In my paintings,” says Close, “I deconstruct a photo image—breaking it into pieces—and create a whole new image. In fact, all artworks that interest me are constructed.”

            Why such a fascination with the minuscule? Says Close: As a child, “I would take my grandmother’s magnifying glass, and I’d scan the covers of the magazines, which during that time were mostly hand-painted illustrations, to figure out how paintings got made; what different touch each of them had.” 

He mostly paints self-portraits and faces of friends, but has also done portraits of the Dalai Lama, Barack Obama, Brad Pitt, and composer Philip Glass.

“There’s a real job in putting these little marks together,” says Close. “They may look like hot dogs, but with them I build a painting.”

A born artist, when he was 11, he saw a Jackson Pollock in a museum, and he says, “I was absolutely outraged, disturbed. It was so far removed from what I thought art was. However, within two or three days, I was dripping paint all over my old paintings.

“In a way, I’ve been chasing that experience ever since. That’s the reason I’ve been going to see shows in different galleries, and trying to look at the work of emerging artists as much as I can, in an attempt to recreate or re-live that sensation of being shocked.”

            His work is all the more remarkable for two reasons. First, Close, who is 77, suffers from face blindness, whose formal name is prosopagnosia. As a result, he cannot remember people by their faces. It would be all too convenient an explanation if that was why Close paints faces, and some say he doesn’t actually have the disorder at all—It’s just a legend that surrounds the artist and his works.

            Close, who might know best, doesn’t buy that. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that having face blindness, I paint people’s faces,” he says. “It’s my way of getting closer to people. When I paint someone, it’s always a person’s face I want to remember.”

Completely paralyzed

Close has confronted even worse woes. In 1988, when he was 48, a spinal-artery collapse left him nearly completely paralyzed from the neck down.

He had already struggled with physical ailments as a child. The kidney disease nephritis kept him in bed at home for a year when he was a sixth-grader. (At around the same time his father died, and his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.) He also had a rare neuromuscular disorder that made it hard for him to pick up his feet. Plus, he was dyslexic.

After being reduced to quadriplegia, within eight months he was painting with a brush held between his teeth. 
“The worst possible thing in the world can happen to you, and you will overcome it,” he says. “You will be happy again.” 

 After months of additional intensive physical therapy, he learned to paint with a brush strapped to his wrist, and he has regained much more mobility over the years, though he remains confined to a wheelchair. His motorized easel will rotate canvases and move them up and down to bring his works-in-progress within his reach.

“I never back up,” says Close. “If I did, I’d never get the damn things [the paintings] done.”

MORAL: Push the paint of your life around.

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