Renowned artist Close visits 185 Nassau Street

"He's painted more de Koonings than de Kooning and better Hans Hoffmans than Hans Hoffman," Anthony Grafton, chair of the Council of the Humanities and history professor, said by way of introducing renowned artist Chuck Close last week.

Calling Close a "civic, generous man" and commending his "extraordinary virtuosity," Grafton set the tone of the lecture Close gave during his visit to campus last Thursday as this fall's Belknap Visitor in the Humanities. Considered by ARTNews magazine to be one of the 50 most influential people in the art world, Close was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1998.

Close spent the day meeting with Visual Arts students and faculty members and later gave a public lecture in McCosh 50.

Close emerged in the late 1960s as a photorealist painter of harsh black and white images. His portraiture has since evolved into colorful canvases composed of tiny, abstract increments that collectively form a recognizable picture.

Yet as a child, Chuck Close seemed destined for failure. He was dyslexic and strong in neither athletics nor academics. His disability led teachers to think he was "dumb and lazy" since there was little awareness of learning difficulties, Close said.

However, Close developed an interest in art at an early age, and his father built him an easel and bought him a paint set. At the age of eight, Close took private lessons and painted from nude models.

"I became the envy of my classmates," he said.

Instead of writing compositions in school, which was impossible because of his learning disability, Close would draw a picture to show that he understood and was interested in the material.

Through art, Close was able to succeed academically and devised ways to cope with his handicap. He earned a degree from the University of Washington in St. Louis, was a Fulbright scholar to Austria and received an MFA from Yale University.

Despite his struggles, Close learned "to always alter the variables so that you have to overcome your facility."

As a student, Chuck Close was a master of copying the style of famous artists, especially the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning.

"De Kooning is my hero — the greatest artist of the 20th century as far as I'm concerned," Close said, "When I finally met him [de Kooning], I said to him, 'Finally! Someone who's mad a few more de Koonings than I have."

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However, as a professional artist, Close had the daunting task of creating his own style.

Close soon realized his preference for large-scale paintings.

"I wanted to make something you could see across the room that would knock your socks off," he said, "The bigger they are, the harder they are to ignore."

The size of Close's paintings is usually so big that, as he puts it, "at a comfortable distance you can't see the whole thing." Thus "the Chuck Close dance" was created — gallery jargon for the movement of crowds at a Chuck Close exhibit. First, viewers move back to see the whole image, and then closer to examine the details of the work.

Although Close's portraits are monumental in scale, they remain intimate and penetrating, exposing the personality and complex psychology of the subject.

To achieve this emotional effect, Close only paints his family and close friends. "Warhol was painting celebrities, but I wanted to paint ordinary folks," Close said.

Ironically, many of Chuck Close's subjects, friends of Close before they became famous, are now celebrities. His subjects have included artists Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Rauschenberg, composer Philip Glass and curator Robert Storr.

Despite his consistent subject matter, Chuck Close has experimented with a variety of styles and methods of painting. After working in black and white, Close moved to color, dissecting full color painting into a three step process. He would paint the portrait first in magenta, then cyan, then yellow (magenta, cyan and yellow are the primary colors of printing) to achieve full color.

Close has also constructed his portraits out of tiny airbrush bursts, thumbprints and colorful, looping brushstrokes.

Close's current style is looser and more abstract, departing from the superrealism of his early career. The pixels that comprise his portraits have gotten bigger, more colorful, and less geometric. "They're doughnuts, hot dogs and whisky bottles," he said.

More recently, Close has collaborated with printers, creating intaglios, woodcuts, silkscreen prints, and linoleum cuts of his portraits.

Close's prints will be the subject of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that will run from Jan. 13 to April 18, 2004. Featuring over 100 images, "Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration" will also include materials from the printmaking process, so that Close's working methods will be clear.

"Painting is the most magical art form. It's just colored dirt dragged across canvas, yet it creates form where there is none. I want to demystify the process and lay out the illusion and the device of the illusion," Close said.

"He [Close] shows you his trick pockets and it's still magic in the end," Grafton said.

The Program of Belknap Visitors was created to commemorate Chauncey Belknap '12. Previous honorees include sculptor Richard Serra, writer Don Delillo, artist Frank Stella '58 and playwright Harold Pinter.