Charles Thomas Close was an American painter, visual artist, and photographer who made massive-scale photorealist and abstract portraits of himself and others.
41 Facts About Chuck Close
2.
Chuck Close created photo portraits using a very large format camera.
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Chuck Close adapted his painting style and working methods in 1988, after being paralyzed by an occlusion of the anterior spinal artery.
4.
Chuck Close said he had prosopagnosia, and suggested that this condition is what first inspired him to do portraits.
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Local writer John Patric was an early anti-establishment intellectual influence on him, and a role model for the iconoclastic and theatric artist's persona Chuck Close learned to project in subsequent years.
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Chuck Close moved to New York City in 1967 and established himself in SoHo.
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Chuck Close had been known for his skillful brushwork as a graduate student at Yale University.
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Chuck Close worked methodically, starting his loose but regular grid from the left hand corner of the canvas.
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Chuck Close's works are generally larger than life and highly focused.
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Chuck Close said he had prosopagnosia, known as face blindness, in which he had difficulty recognizing new faces.
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Chuck Close made seven more black and white portraits during this period.
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Chuck Close has been quoted as saying that he used such diluted paint in the airbrush that all eight of the paintings were made with a single tube of Mars Black acrylic.
13.
On December 7,1988, Chuck Close felt a strange pain in his chest.
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Chuck Close delivered his speech and then made his way across the street to Beth Israel Medical Center where he had a seizure which left him paralyzed from the neck down.
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For months, Chuck Close was in rehab strengthening his muscles with physical therapy; he soon had slight movement in his arms and could walk, yet only for a few steps.
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Chuck Close spoke candidly about the effect disability had on his life and work in the book Chronicles of Courage: Very Special Artists written by Jean Kennedy Smith and George Plimpton and published by Random House.
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However, Chuck Close continued to paint with a brush strapped onto his wrist, creating large portraits in low-resolution grid squares created by an assistant.
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Chuck Close proved able to create his desired effects even with the most difficult of materials to control.
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Chuck Close made a practice, during his final years, of portraying artists who are similarly invested in portraiture, like Cecily Brown, Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, and Zhang Huan.
20.
Chuck Close was a printmaker throughout his career, with most of his prints published by Pace Editions, New York.
21.
Chuck Close made his first serious foray into print making in 1972, when he moved himself and family to San Francisco to work on a mezzotint at Crown Point Press for a three-month residency.
22.
Vanity Fair's 20th Annual Hollywood edition in March 2014 featured a portfolio of 20 Polaroid portraits of movie stars shot by Chuck Close, including Robert De Niro, Scarlett Johansson, Helen Mirren, Julia Roberts, and Oprah Winfrey.
23.
Chuck Close donated an original print of his "Self Portrait" in 2002 to the public library in Monroe, Washington, his hometown.
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Chuck Close credited the Walker Art Center and its then-director Martin Friedman for launching his career with the purchase of Big Self-Portrait in 1969, the first painting he sold.
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Chuck Close's work has since been the subject of more than 150 solo exhibitions including a number of major museum retrospectives.
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Chuck Close participated in almost 800 group exhibitions, including documentas V and VI, the Venice Biennale, and the Carnegie International.
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In 2013, Chuck Close's work was featured in an exhibit at White Cube in Bermondsey, London.
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In 2016, Chuck Close's work was the subject of a retrospective at the Schack Art Center in Everett, Washington, where he attended high school and community college.
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The recipient of the National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton in 2000, the New York State Governor's Art Award, and the Skowhegan Arts Medal, among many others, Chuck Close received over 20 honorary degrees including one from Yale University, his alma mater.
30.
Chuck Close painted President Clinton in 2006 and photographed President Barack Obama in 2012.
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Chuck Close was represented by the Pace Gallery from 1977, and subsequently by White Cube from 1999.
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In 2007, Chuck Close was honored by the New York Stem Cell Foundation and donated artwork for an exclusive online auction.
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In September 2012, Magnolia Editions published two tapestry editions and three print editions by Chuck Close depicting President Barack Obama.
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Chuck Close previously sold work at auction to raise funds for the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore.
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In October 2013, Chuck Close donated a watercolor print of Genevieve Bahrenburg and a watercolor print self-portrait to ARTWALK NY, a cause that benefits the Coalition for the Homeless.
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Chuck Close was one of eight artists who volunteered in 2013 to participate in President Barack Obama's Turnaround Arts initiative, which aims to improve low-performing schools by increasing student "engagement" through the arts.
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Chuck Close mentored 34 students in the sixth through eighth grades at Roosevelt School in Bridgeport, Connecticut, one of eight schools in the nation to participate in this public-private partnership developed in cooperation with the US Department of Education and the White House Domestic Policy Council.
38.
Chuck Close appeared on The Colbert Report on August 12,2010, where he said that he watches the show every night.
39.
The National Gallery of Art cancelled a Chuck Close exhibition, planned to open May 2018, due to the allegations.
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Chuck Close lived and worked in Bridgehampton and Long Beach, New York, and New York City's East Village.
41.
Chuck Close died on August 19,2021, in Oceanside, New York, at the age of 81, from congestive heart failure.