Chuck Close
Chuck Close
Charles Thomas "Chuck" Closeis an American painter/artist and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Close often paints abstract portraits, that are shown in the world's finest galleries. Although a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors. Close lives and works in Bridgehampton, New York and Long Beach, NY and New York City's East Village. His first...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth5 July 1940
CityMonroe, WA
CountryUnited States of America
Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.
Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you.
You don't have to have a great art idea - just get to work and something will happen. So that's pretty much my modus operandi and pretty much my principal position, such as it is.
I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.
My mother was a piano teacher, my father an inventor. He invented the reflective paint they still use on airstrips. They had faith in my ambition, and I think that made all the difference.
Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.
I have no intention of flattering people. I like wrinkles and crow's feet and flaws, and somebody should know, if I'm going to photograph them, that's going to show up, you know?
If you ask yourself a personal enough question, your response is more likely to be personal, and that means that if you get yourself into trouble, no one else's answers are going to be applicable, and you'll be flying by the seat of your pants and you'll have to come up with something.
If you think about the way a composer would go in a room and score, let's say, the oboe's gonna play this note, the bassoon's gonna play that note, the french horn will play that note, the resultant sound, the combination of those notes makes kind of a chord, and I'm doing the same thing with color.
I mean, if you think about a writer, you're going to write a novel that takes several months, but there's never a time you're doing anything more than shoving one word up against the next. And clusters of those words make sentences and paragraphs and a chapter. You just try to maintain the same voice and the same attitude so it sounds like the same person wrote the last chapter that wrote the first chapter.
The city continues to be a magnet for the best and the brightest that come here from all over the country and all over the world. It's a very vital exciting community. The art world gobbles up people and spits them out the other end and keeps chugging along.
And I think, you know, painters drop crumbs along the trail, Hansel and Gretel style, for people to pick up if they want to.