On August 19, 2021, American artist Chuck Close passed away from cardiopulmonary failure. His works appear in museums around the world and are easily recognizable as oversized portraits that take up entire walls. Early in his career he focused on super-realistic faces that cannot be distinguished from photographs even from close up, like the first image here, a self-portrait from 1968. He explored this realism as a backlash against what he considered to be the overly abstract works of many artists in vogue at the time.
Later, he worked increasingly in color, creating pixels of various complexity — many of these portraits seem photo-realistic from a distance, but have an abstraction up close, with blobs of color that look like simple shapes. If you look at his self-portrait on the second image up close, you can see what I mean.
I love looking at how Chuck Close could take a subject and paint the same thing in so many different ways — check out his “Lucas One” and “Lucas Two”, for instance. Both are done in Close’s pixelated style, but one has a more psychedelic take.
Close suffered many physical impairments in life, but the most difficult was a collapsed spinal artery in 1988 that paralyzed his legs — initially it even did his arms and his hand dexterity was never the same — the final photo shows the artist at work after “the Event,” as Close called it. Throughout his life of 81 years, Chuck Close’s artworks were outsized compared to the confinement imposed on his own physical body.
Source(s): Wikipedia and _New York Times_, “Chuck Close, Artist if Outsized Reality, Dies at 81,” Ken Johnson and Robin Pogrebin, August 19, 2021
