Chuck Close Paper
Directions:
3 Page research paper handwritten in your Process Journal
Summarize the attached article or use your notes from the movie. Here are some questions to help you write your summary (you don’t have to use them you can just use them if you need help. In fact you don’t need to use the provided article at all to write your paper, you can do your own research if you wish) In your paper write as if we are having a conversation. I don’t want a history paper (ex: don’t tell me when/where he was born) tell me about how he makes art.
Success Criteria
**** You will need to use the photos out of your PJ to complete this assignment***
3 Page research paper handwritten in your Process Journal
Summarize the attached article or use your notes from the movie. Here are some questions to help you write your summary (you don’t have to use them you can just use them if you need help. In fact you don’t need to use the provided article at all to write your paper, you can do your own research if you wish) In your paper write as if we are having a conversation. I don’t want a history paper (ex: don’t tell me when/where he was born) tell me about how he makes art.
- How are his works made?
- What is his method?
- What is looking for when he takes someone’s photograph?
- Who influenced him as an artist?
- Who is an artist he admires? Why?
- What happened to him physically and how did that affect his paintings?
- What grabs your attention in the work?
- What is the work about?
- What do you think Close is trying to say about his work?
- Why do you think the artist created this work?
- What have you seen or learned from this work that you might apply to your own artwork or your thinking?
- Paste in 2 pieces of his art
- 1st piece must be a realistic portrait
- 2nd piece must be one of his more abstract works (where the grid becomes a part of the art)
- Tell me what the works are and how they are made
- I will give you extra credit if you go to the art museum and stand next to his work and get your photo taken. (Don’t use flash)
Success Criteria
- Clear, big headlines
- Neat, clean handwriting
- All questions from above are answered
- Images are neatly cut out and glued into the process journal.
- NO tape or staples. If an image is hanging off the page it will not count
**** You will need to use the photos out of your PJ to complete this assignment***
Up Close with Chuck Close
Contemporary American painter Chuck Close is over six feet tall. Yet each of the many heads he has painted tower over him.
Chuck Close has been painting one subject- the human face- for nearly 30 years. What is unusual about these faces is that each is the size of a wall and none of them are really portraits. Why does he paint this way and why have these faces made Close one of the most important artists working today?
When Chuck Close began painting in the 1960s, he was influenced by a group known as “pop” artists. They were the first to develop art forms based on images from “popular” culture. They felt the media had become so important that images from TV, films, and magazines were as real for many people as their own lives. With his enormous, detailed Chuck Close points out society’s dependency on second-hand visual experiences.
None of the paintings on these pages are traditional portraits. These works tell us nothing about their subjects’ lives, feelings, character, profession, or social status. They are paintings of photos of faces. The overwhelming detail forces us to think, not about the subjects, but about the image itself- how and why it was made.
Close began painting heads in the 1960s, working from small photos. His first faces, like Phil and Mark were made with an airbrush (a small spray gun) to duplicate photo’s mechanical quality. He magnified every blemish and imperfection, changing the focus of each feature as a camera would. Later, as you can see in the works like Francesco, Close’s images began to loosen up. He started using the textures made by brushstrokes. His most recent images are built from specks of color that can be “read” as faces only from a distance.
Since the process of creation is as important to Chuck Close as the finished image, his works could actually be paintings of anything. But would any image be as powerful as a nine-foot-high human face? As the artists says “I painting heads because heads matter to everybody. If you paint a face big enough, it’s hard to ignore!”
Born Charles Close in 1940 in the State of Washington, the artist was an only child. From the age of 4 close knew he was going to be an artist. “I was always single minded. If you know what you want to do with your life, it saves a lot of time.” When he was in his teens, Close had a muscular weakness and wasn’t very good at sports. Learning disabilities made school difficult for him. But he discovered he could draw better than anyone else. As he puts it, “I drew to entertain my friends. And I had a lot of support from my family; it set me apart from other people and made me feel special.”
After graduating from high school, Close went to the University of Washington. “I realized when I got into college that I could the system work for me in a way it hadn’t in high school,” he says. He graduated with the highest grade point average in the art school. He then attended Yale Graduate School and got a grant to study in Europe. In 1967, Close moved to New York City and began painting from small black-and-white photos.
During the next 20 years, Close became world famous for the giant faces he created. Then, at the end of 1988, the artist was hospitalized due to the sudden collapse of a spinal artery. Since that time he has been in a wheelchair and paralyzed from the neck down. Since then he has painted a series of portraits many critics have called the best work he has ever done. The artist says, “Sometimes I’ll roll by a mirror and I’m shocked to see myself in a wheelchair, but I’ve learned to surmount problems since I was a kid. I had to recover enough to paint. There was nothing I can do. There is nothing else I want to do.”
Since he began painting heads, Close has used his own face more than any other. He says, “I have been just as ruthless with my own image. It has given me an idea of how my subjects must feel.” He always uses the same frontal, head-on, passport-photo view, with unsmiling lips and deadpan eyes. In spite of his disability, he works in much the same way as always, painting his huge portraits while sitting in a forklift that can be lowered and raised. He uses a grid to enlarge the photos to the size of his canvas, then builds the image block by block (it takes more than a year to do a large portrait). He has used this system of squares to reproduce his own features in a number of media, among them crayon, airbrush, and fingerprints. This work is a kind of double self-portrait, made by using an inkpad to stamp out an image of his face with his fingerprint.
Close’s fingerprint faces can be grotesque. But as the artist once said about the reactions to his portraits, “Before I painted my wife, she complained that if I didn’t do a painting of her, people would think that I didn’t love her. Then I painted her. Now she thinks that people will really think I must hate her.”
A Close Encounter
Two decades ago, no artist was riding higher than Chuck Close. Critics called him one of the greatest portrait painters ever. His giant “mug shots” sold for six figures. Close was world renowned when, suddenly, he was stuck down. Just before Christmas, in 1988, an artery in his spinal cord collapsed. Doctors still have no idea why, at the time, he was totally paralyzed from the neck down. After months of work, Close regained some control in his arms and legs, but he would never regain the use of his hands. He knew he had to find another way to paint. He found that with a brush strapped to his hand, he could work paint on a canvas, after months of practice, he taught his arm muscles to take the place of his hands.
CC: When you’re trapped in a body that doesn’t work, it’s really an amazing experience. But once you know how to make art, you figure out some way to smear the stuff on, even if you have to spit it on the canvas.
Two years later, Close was back in his Manhattan studio, working on a portrait of his friend April Gornick. It would be a four-month process, alive with color and built by dividing the canvas into tiny squares and filling them in one by one.
CC: These painting are built more like someone would knit or crochet than the way someone traditionally paints.
So each grid is a little painting?
CC: Yes, and I have a little joy with each little painting. There’s a celebratory aspect to these pieces. There are a lot of things I can’t do that used to do, but I can still paint.
And paint his best work yet, according to the critics. But those who know him are not surprised, Close likes challenges. Long before his disability, he made a practice of setting up his own obstacles. How much paint did you use for the portrait, Joe?
CC: I used less than two tablespoons of paint for the whole painting- it’s the artists Joe Zucker. He wanted to look like a used-car salesman, so he changed the way he looked before I painted him. Most people have trouble dealing with the results, so they change the way they look right after I paint them.
That doesn’t bother you?
CC: It bothers them. That’s why I don’t do commissioned portraits. If someone’s ego is big enough to get a nine-foot-high painting of themselves, they’d want their nose straightened, teeth capped, skin smoothed. I never wanted to get into that.
Having just finished his tenth painting since his hospitalization, Close is back at the top of the art world. He tries to do everything he did before in spite of the difficulty of even the simplest task now. But he prefers life in his studio, painting to rock music.
CC: In a world where I have little control over things going on around me, I can at least control the world in my own studio.
Contemporary American painter Chuck Close is over six feet tall. Yet each of the many heads he has painted tower over him.
Chuck Close has been painting one subject- the human face- for nearly 30 years. What is unusual about these faces is that each is the size of a wall and none of them are really portraits. Why does he paint this way and why have these faces made Close one of the most important artists working today?
When Chuck Close began painting in the 1960s, he was influenced by a group known as “pop” artists. They were the first to develop art forms based on images from “popular” culture. They felt the media had become so important that images from TV, films, and magazines were as real for many people as their own lives. With his enormous, detailed Chuck Close points out society’s dependency on second-hand visual experiences.
None of the paintings on these pages are traditional portraits. These works tell us nothing about their subjects’ lives, feelings, character, profession, or social status. They are paintings of photos of faces. The overwhelming detail forces us to think, not about the subjects, but about the image itself- how and why it was made.
Close began painting heads in the 1960s, working from small photos. His first faces, like Phil and Mark were made with an airbrush (a small spray gun) to duplicate photo’s mechanical quality. He magnified every blemish and imperfection, changing the focus of each feature as a camera would. Later, as you can see in the works like Francesco, Close’s images began to loosen up. He started using the textures made by brushstrokes. His most recent images are built from specks of color that can be “read” as faces only from a distance.
Since the process of creation is as important to Chuck Close as the finished image, his works could actually be paintings of anything. But would any image be as powerful as a nine-foot-high human face? As the artists says “I painting heads because heads matter to everybody. If you paint a face big enough, it’s hard to ignore!”
Born Charles Close in 1940 in the State of Washington, the artist was an only child. From the age of 4 close knew he was going to be an artist. “I was always single minded. If you know what you want to do with your life, it saves a lot of time.” When he was in his teens, Close had a muscular weakness and wasn’t very good at sports. Learning disabilities made school difficult for him. But he discovered he could draw better than anyone else. As he puts it, “I drew to entertain my friends. And I had a lot of support from my family; it set me apart from other people and made me feel special.”
After graduating from high school, Close went to the University of Washington. “I realized when I got into college that I could the system work for me in a way it hadn’t in high school,” he says. He graduated with the highest grade point average in the art school. He then attended Yale Graduate School and got a grant to study in Europe. In 1967, Close moved to New York City and began painting from small black-and-white photos.
During the next 20 years, Close became world famous for the giant faces he created. Then, at the end of 1988, the artist was hospitalized due to the sudden collapse of a spinal artery. Since that time he has been in a wheelchair and paralyzed from the neck down. Since then he has painted a series of portraits many critics have called the best work he has ever done. The artist says, “Sometimes I’ll roll by a mirror and I’m shocked to see myself in a wheelchair, but I’ve learned to surmount problems since I was a kid. I had to recover enough to paint. There was nothing I can do. There is nothing else I want to do.”
Since he began painting heads, Close has used his own face more than any other. He says, “I have been just as ruthless with my own image. It has given me an idea of how my subjects must feel.” He always uses the same frontal, head-on, passport-photo view, with unsmiling lips and deadpan eyes. In spite of his disability, he works in much the same way as always, painting his huge portraits while sitting in a forklift that can be lowered and raised. He uses a grid to enlarge the photos to the size of his canvas, then builds the image block by block (it takes more than a year to do a large portrait). He has used this system of squares to reproduce his own features in a number of media, among them crayon, airbrush, and fingerprints. This work is a kind of double self-portrait, made by using an inkpad to stamp out an image of his face with his fingerprint.
Close’s fingerprint faces can be grotesque. But as the artist once said about the reactions to his portraits, “Before I painted my wife, she complained that if I didn’t do a painting of her, people would think that I didn’t love her. Then I painted her. Now she thinks that people will really think I must hate her.”
A Close Encounter
Two decades ago, no artist was riding higher than Chuck Close. Critics called him one of the greatest portrait painters ever. His giant “mug shots” sold for six figures. Close was world renowned when, suddenly, he was stuck down. Just before Christmas, in 1988, an artery in his spinal cord collapsed. Doctors still have no idea why, at the time, he was totally paralyzed from the neck down. After months of work, Close regained some control in his arms and legs, but he would never regain the use of his hands. He knew he had to find another way to paint. He found that with a brush strapped to his hand, he could work paint on a canvas, after months of practice, he taught his arm muscles to take the place of his hands.
CC: When you’re trapped in a body that doesn’t work, it’s really an amazing experience. But once you know how to make art, you figure out some way to smear the stuff on, even if you have to spit it on the canvas.
Two years later, Close was back in his Manhattan studio, working on a portrait of his friend April Gornick. It would be a four-month process, alive with color and built by dividing the canvas into tiny squares and filling them in one by one.
CC: These painting are built more like someone would knit or crochet than the way someone traditionally paints.
So each grid is a little painting?
CC: Yes, and I have a little joy with each little painting. There’s a celebratory aspect to these pieces. There are a lot of things I can’t do that used to do, but I can still paint.
And paint his best work yet, according to the critics. But those who know him are not surprised, Close likes challenges. Long before his disability, he made a practice of setting up his own obstacles. How much paint did you use for the portrait, Joe?
CC: I used less than two tablespoons of paint for the whole painting- it’s the artists Joe Zucker. He wanted to look like a used-car salesman, so he changed the way he looked before I painted him. Most people have trouble dealing with the results, so they change the way they look right after I paint them.
That doesn’t bother you?
CC: It bothers them. That’s why I don’t do commissioned portraits. If someone’s ego is big enough to get a nine-foot-high painting of themselves, they’d want their nose straightened, teeth capped, skin smoothed. I never wanted to get into that.
Having just finished his tenth painting since his hospitalization, Close is back at the top of the art world. He tries to do everything he did before in spite of the difficulty of even the simplest task now. But he prefers life in his studio, painting to rock music.
CC: In a world where I have little control over things going on around me, I can at least control the world in my own studio.