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
Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.
All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.
Any innovation that is evident in my paintings is a direct result of something that happened in the course of making a print.
Paintings can make you cry and it's just **colored dirt**.
I didn't want a model in the room for three or four months. It would drive me crazy, drive them crazy. But also, they gain weight, they lose weight, their hair gets long, they cut it short, they're awake, they're asleep. And a painting becomes the mean average of all those conditions. I simply looked at photography as a way to jot down the information.
No one was more surprised than me when my paintings started selling, except maybe my dealer.
I don't want the viewer to be able to peel away the layers of my painting like the layers of an onion and find that all the blues are on the same level.
Women in general interest me. I like how women are more liable to talk about real things, personal things.
I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings.
I don't believe in inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. Some of the time you know you're cooking, and the rest of the time, you just do it.
Once I started working with the Polaroid, I would take a shot and if that shot was good, then I'd move the model and change the lighting or whatever... slowly sneaking up on what I wanted rather than having to predetermine what it was.
I'm very learning-disabled, and I think it drove me to what I'm doing.
It's always a pleasure to talk about someone else's work.
I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.