Chuck Close, Self-Portrait

Chuck Close Prints: Process and CollaborationApr 09, 2006 - Jun 25, 2006

For more than thirty years, Chuck Close has explored the art of printmaking in his continuing investigation

into the principles of perception. This exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Close's involvement

and accomplishment with the varied forms and processes of printmaking. Featuring approximately one

hundred works dated from 1972 to 2002, Chuck Close Prints illustrates the artist's range of invention in

etching, aquatint, lithography, handmade paper, direct gravure, silkscreen, traditional Japanese woodcut,

and reduction linocut. Highlighting the creative processes and technical collaboration between the artist

and master printers, the exhibition demonstrates how Close has consistently but variously challenged the

accepted boundaries of the printmaking tradition. Taken together, these prints constitute a remarkable

self-portrait of the creative drive, vision, and intellect of one of America's most important living artists.

Chuck Close was born in 1940 and grew up in Washington State. A precocious draftsman from an early

age, he quickly mastered realistic techniques like drawing in perspective. As a young man he attended

the well-known MFA program at Yale University, where his classmates included the sculptor Richard

Serra and the sculptor and painter Nancy Graves. In the 1960s Close became known for his large-scale,

hyper-realistic paintings of faces. Throughout his career he has continued to create images of faces,

which he calls "heads," in a wide variety of sizes, styles, and media.

Close has commented that he considers a face to be a roadmap of human experience. His works are

often self-portraits and portraits of his friends and family. In his work, the topology of the human face

becomes a series of gridded abstractions that, when assembled in the eye of the viewer, create an

imagistic whole. Celebrated as a quintessential painter and photographer, Close has also mastered the

unique artistic language of printmaking, a process that requires a special degree of trust and cooperation

between artist and technician. The self-portraits and portraits that make up the exhibition encompass the

major forms of printmaking.

From the artist's ambitious first mezzotint, Keith (1972), to his recent pulp-paper multiples, this exhibition

chronicles Close’s genius in the medium in which he has done his most exciting work. While the

production of a painting can occupy Close for many months, it is not unusual for one print to take more

than two years to complete, from conception to final edition. The relationship between Close and the

master printers is key to the success of his prints, as the artist insists on a decidedly interactive approach

to their creation. Close has remarked, "Like any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of

everyone who is working for me... My prints have been truly collaborative, even though control is

something that I give up reluctantly."

Terrie Sultan, curator of the exhibition, writes in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, "This project

is entitled Process and Collaboration because those two words are essential to any conversation with

Close about his prints. The creative process is as important to him as the finished product, and these

works strive to reveal the routes taken to get to them. Showing the progressive and state proofs here

along with the editioned works demystifies the artist's decision-making process, allowing us to visualize

how these complex images are made, how he was thinking when he made the mark."

Photo Credit: Gianfranco Gorgoni

Chuck Close (b. 1940, Monroe, WA) is renowned for his highly inventive techniques of painting the human face, and is best known for his large-scale, photo-based portrait paintings. In 1988, Close was paralyzed following a rare spinal artery collapse; he continues to paint using a brush-holding device strapped to his wrist and forearm. His practice extends beyond painting to encompass printmaking, photography, and, most recently, tapestries based on Polaroids.

In 2000, Close was presented with the prestigious National Medal of Arts by President Clinton. Close is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, has served on the board of many arts organizations, and was recently appointed by President Obama to serve on The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

Close joined Pace Gallery in 1977.

CHUCK CLOSE 

SELECTED ONE-ARTIST EXHIBITIONS   DATESBorn, 1940, Monroe, WashingtonLives and works in New York EDUCATION1962, University of Washington, Seattle, B.A.1963, Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, B.F.A.1964, Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, M.F.A.  2015 Chuck Close: Red Yellow Blue, Pace Gallery, 534 West 25th Street, New York, September 11–October 17, 2015. (Catalogue) Chuck Close Prints, Schack Art Center, Everett, Washington, May 12–September 7, 2016. Chuck Close Photographs, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York, May 10–July 26, 2015. Traveled to: University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, September 11–December 6, 2015. Chuck Close, Merchant House, Amsterdam, April 17–July 12, 2015. Chuck Close: Face Forward, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation, Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California, January 17–April 5, 2015. Traveled to: Schneider Museum of Art, Southern Oregon University, June 19–September 5, 2015. 2014 Chuck Close, Alan Avery Art Company, Atlanta, March 9–April 19, 2014. Chuck Close: Nudes 1967–2014, Pace Gallery, 534 West 25th Street, New York, February 28–March 29, 2014. (Catalogue) 2013 Chuck Close: About Face, Westport Arts Center, Connecticut, November 22, 2013–January 12, 2014. Chuck Close: Radical Innovator, Contessa Gallery, Cleveland, November 8, 2013–January 12, 2014. Chuck Close and his Turnaround Arts Kids, Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, Connecticut, November 7–December 15, 2013. Chuck Close: Tapestries, Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, October 2–November 3, 2013. Closer: The Graphic Art of Chuck Close, Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut, September 28, 2013–January 26, 2014. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Important Works on Paper from the Past Forty Years, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, September 5–November 16, 2013. Chuck Close, Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York, August 10–October 14, 2013. (Brochure) Chuck Close: Photo Maquettes, Eykyn Maclean, New York, April 16–May 24, 2013. (Catalogue) 2012 Chuck Close, Galerie Thomas Modern, Munich, November 23, 2012–February 16, 2013. (Brochure) Chuck Close: New Works, Adamson Gallery, Washington, D.C., November 10–December 29, 2012. 

Chuck Close: Works on Paper 1975–2012, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, Monterey Museum of Art, California, October 27, 2012–February 17, 2013. Traveled to: Oklahoma City Museum of Art, December 13, 2013–February 16, 2014. Chuck Close, Pace Prints, New York, October 25–November 21, 2012. Chuck Close, Pace Gallery, 534 West 25th Street, New York, October 19–December 22, 2012. (Catalogue) Chuck Close and Crown Point Press: Prints and Processes, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, July 7–October 24, 2012. 2011 Chuck Close: Photographs, Prints and Tapestries, A Selection 1978–2010, Galerie de Bellefeuille, Montreal, November 5–30, 2011. (Catalogue) Chuck Close, Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, October 29–December 22, 2011. Chuck Close: Self-Portraits in Edition, Steven Vail Fine Arts Project Room, Des Moines, March 17–July 8, 2011. 2010 Chuck Close: Drawings of the 1970s, Craig F. Starr Gallery, New York, October 15–December 18, 2010. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: People Who Matter to Me, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, July 10–November 14, 2010. Chuck Close: Polaroids, Xippas Gallery, Athens, June–July 2010. Chuck Close: Polaroids, Galerie Xippas, Paris, April 10–May 22, 2010. Chuck Close: Portraits, Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art, California State University, San Bernardino, March 26–May 25, 2010. Chuck Close, Pace Prints, New York, February 4–27, 2010. Look Close: Works on Paper by Chuck Close, Louis K. Meisel, New York, January 22–March 1, 2010. 2009 Chuck Close: Recent Works, Contessa Gallery, Cleveland, September 11–November 1, 2009. Familiar Faces: Chuck Close in Ohio Collections, Akron Art Museum, Ohio, September 5, 2009–January 17, 2010. Faces: Chuck Close and Contemporary Portraiture, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, June 27–October 18, 2009. Chuck Close: Maquettes and Multi-Part Work (1966–2009), Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, May 7–June 6, 2009. Chuck Close: Selected Paintings and Tapestries 2005–2009, PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, New York, May 1–June 20, 2009. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: The Keith Series, Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, South Carolina, January 17–May 31, 2009. 2008 Chuck Close: Grids, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Inc., Moscow, December 16, 2008–February 25, 2009. Chuck Close: Recent Work, William Shearburn Gallery, Santa Fe, June 6–July 1, 2008. Chuck Close: 10 Years in Print, William Shearburn Gallery, Saint Louis, April 4–May 5, 2008. Chuck Close, Philip Glass,40 Years, Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, Metropolitan Opera House, New York, March 16–May 17, 2008. (Brochure) Chuck Close, Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto, January 10–February 2, 2008. 2007 Chuck Close: Janet/Pulp, 2007 Print & Process, Pace Prints, New York, November 29, 2007–January 5, 2008.

 Chuck Close: Self-Portrait, 2007, Pace Prints, New York, November 1, 2007–January 10, 2008. Chuck Close: Family and Others, White Cube, London, October 10–November 17, 2007. Traveled as: Chuck Close: Seven Portraits, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, February 29–April 13, 2008. (Catalogues) Chuck Close: Self-Portrait/Scribble/Etching Portfolio, 2000, Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, New York, August 24–November 4, 2007. Traveled to: Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts, November 16, 2007–March 18, 2008; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, May 1–September 21, 2008. (Catalogue) Chuck Close, Galerie Xippas, Paris, February 24–April 7, 2007. Chuck Close: Paintings 1968–2006, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, February 6–May 7, 2007. Traveled to: Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany, May 26–September 2, 2007. (Catalogue) 2006 Chuck Close: From the Collection of Sherry Mallin, Nassau County Museum, Roslyn Harbor, New York, November 19, 2006–February 4, 2007. Chuck Close: A Couple of Ways of Doing Something, Aperture Foundation, New York, November 10, 2006–January 4, 2007. Traveled to: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, June 23–September 9, 2007;Tacoma Art Museum, Washington, March 1–July 15, 2008; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, October 6–November 26, 2008; Louisiana Art and Science Museum, Baton Rouge, January 17–March 15, 2009; Sonoma County Museum, Santa Rosa, June 19–August 2, 2009; Austin Museum of Art, August 22–November 8, 2009; David Owsley Museum of Art, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, January 15–March 14, 2010; Joseloff Gallery, University of Hartford, Connecticut, April 15–June 27, 2010; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, April 29–June 26, 2011; Loveland Museum/Gallery, Colorado, October 1–December 31, 2011; Wichita Art Museum, January 29–April 15, 2012; Florida Museum of Photographic Arts, Tampa, January 31–March 31, 2013; Tarble Arts Center, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, October 26–December 20, 2013. (Catalogue) Chuck Close, Xippas Gallery, Athens, June 28–October 30, 2006. Chuck Close, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York, June 7–August 13, 2006. 2005 Chuck Close: Self Portraits 1967–2005, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, July 24–October 16, 2005. Traveled to: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 19, 2005–February 28, 2006; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, March 25–July 9, 2006; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, July 22–October 22, 2006. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Recent Paintings, PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, New York, May 10–June 18, 2005. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Face to Face, Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina, April 23–May 28, 2005. 2004 Chuck Close: Prints and Process, Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, North Carolina, January 22–February 27, 2004. Chuck Close: Drawings, Photographs, Prints, Craig F. Starr Associates, New York, January 15–31, 2004. 2003 Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration, Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, September 13–November 23, 2003. Traveled to: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 13–April 18, 2004; Miami Art Museum, May 14–August 22, 2004; Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee, October 29, 2004–March 27, 2005; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina, April 16–August 7, 2005; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, September 6–December 4, 2005; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, April 16–June 25, 2006; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin, July 30–October 8, 2006; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California, January 28–April 22, 2007; Boise Art Museum, May 12–August 12, 2007; Portland Art Museum, Oregon, October 6, 2007–January 6, 2008; Sungkok Museum of Art, Seoul, June 19–September 28, 2008; Frist Center for Visual Arts, Nashville, June 26–September 13, 2009; San Jose Museum of Art, October 6, 2009–January 10, 2010; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, February 13–May 9, 2010; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., July 3–September 12, 2010; Kunsthal Rotterdam, January 28–May 20, 2012; as Chuck Close: Multiple Portraits, MdM Mönchsberg, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg, October 27–February 17, 2013; White Cube Bermondsey, London, March 6–April 21, 2013; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, November 20, 2014–March 8, 2015. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Daguerreotype to Digital,Texas Gallery, Houston, September 13–October 11, 2003. Chuck Close:Prints,Clark Fine Art, Southampton, New York, August 15–September 8, 2003. 

Chuck Close: Recent Works, White Cube, London, January 31–March 15, 2003. (Catalogue) 2002 Chuck Close: Daguerrotypes, Pace/MacGill, New York, November 15, 2002–January 11, 2003. (Joint catalogue with Chuck Close: Recent Works, 2003.) Chuck Close: Paintings, PaceWildenstein, 534 West 25th Street, New York, November 15, 2002–January 11, 2003. (Joint catalogue with Chuck Close: Recent Works, 2003.) Chuck Close: New Editions, Pace Prints, New York, November 1, 2002–January 10, 2003. Chuck Close Prints, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Purchase, September 29–December 29, 2002. Chuck Close Ritratti, American Academy in Rome, February 22–April 21, 2002. Chuck Close, Pace Prints, New York, February 20–March 9, 2002. 2001 Chuck Close: Self Portraits 1967–2001, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, March 8–April 28, 2001. 2000 Chuck Close, Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts, December 9, 2000–March 25, 2001. Chuck Close: Photographic Works, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, September 24-November 26, 2000. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Self-Portraits, Adamson Gallery, Washington, D. C., September 16–October 21, 2000. Chuck Close: Daguerreotypien und Iris Drucke, Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich, September 7–October 28, 2000. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Paintings of Agnes/Prints and Drawings, Harwood Museum of Art, University of New Mexico, Taos, May 7–July 9, 2000. Chuck Close: Recent Prints, Pace Prints, New York, April 8–May 6, 2000. Chuck Close: Recent Paintings, PaceWildenstein, 142 Greene Street, New York, March 16–April 29 (extended through May 6), 2000. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Portraits and Nudes, Pace/MacGill, New York, March 16–April 22, 2000. 1999 Photographs by Chuck Close, White Cube, London, July 23–September 4, 1999. 1998 Chuck Close: Prints, Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, Rhode Island, September 27–October 25, 1998. Chuck Close: Edition Works, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, September 17–October 22, 1998. Chuck Close: Prints 1978–1997, Georg Kargl Gallery, Vienna, September 11–October 10, 1998. Chuck Close, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 26–May 26, 1998. Traveled to: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, June 20–September 13, 1998; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., October 15, 1998–January 10, 1999; Seattle Art Museum, February 18, 1999–May 9, 1999; Hayward Gallery, London, July 22–September 19, 1999. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Self-Portraits, Martin Weinstein Gallery, Minneapolis, March 13–April 11, 1998. Focus: Chuck Close Editioned Works, Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 26–May 26, 1998. Chuck Close: Translations, Akus Gallery, Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic, Connecticut, January 22–February 27, 1998 1997

 Chuck Close: Large-Scale Photographs, Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin, July–August 1997. Chuck Close, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, May 30–June 22, 1997. Chuck Close 'Großformatige Polaroids': Large Polaroids 1984–1995, Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich, March 7–April 26, 1997. 1996 Chuck Close: Large-Scale Photographs, PaceWildensteinMacGill, New York, October 24–November 23, 1996. Traveled to: PaceWildensteinMacGill, Los Angeles, January 24–March 1, 1997. Chuck Close: A Personal Portrait, Works and Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, New York, October 8, 1996–January 6, 1997. 1995 Chuck Close: Alex/Reduction Block, Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles, September 30, 1995–January 7, 1996. Chuck Close: Recent Paintings, PaceWildenstein, Los Angeles, September 29–October 28, 1995. Traveled to: PaceWildenstein, 142 Greene Street, New York, December 2, 1995–January 6, 1996. (Catalogue) Chuck Close, University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, April 12–May 5, 1995. Chuck Close Recent Editions: Alex—Chuck—Lucas, Pace Editions, New York, March 10–April 13, 1995. Chuck Close: The Graphics, Dean Jensen Gallery, Milwaukee, January 20–March 4, 1995. 1994 Chuck Close: 8 peintures récentes, Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, September 24–October 23, 1994. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Visible and Invisible Portraits, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, June 1994. Chuck Close: Retrospektive, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, April 10–June 22, 1994. Traveled to: Lenbachhaus Kunstbau, Munich, July 13–September 11, 1994. (Catalogue) 1993 Chuck Close: Recent Works, The Pace Gallery, 142 Greene Street, New York, October 22–November 27, 1993. (Catalogue) A Print Project by Chuck Close, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 24–September 28, 1993. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Portraits, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, July 21–October 31, 1993. Chuck Close: Lucas Rug, A/D Gallery, New York, April 1–June 3, 1993. Chuck Close Editions, Pace Editions, New York, March 20–30, 1993. Chuck Close: Black and White Portraits, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, March 11–April 24, 1993. 1991 Chuck Close, Art Institute of Boston, Lesley University, Boston, November 8–December 18, 1991. Chuck Close: Recent Paintings, The Pace Gallery, 142 Greene Street, New York, November 2–December 7 (extended through December 14), 1991. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Large Color Photographs, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, September 10–November 17, 1991. Chuck Close: Editions, University Art Museum, University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, September 7–October 24, 1991. Chuck Close: Up Close, Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York, June 15–July 28, 1991. (Catalogue) 1989 Chuck Close: Works on Paper from the Collection of Sherry Hope Mallin, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, October 29, 1989–February 25, 1990.

 Chuck Close Editions: A Catalogue Raisonné and Exhibition, The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, September 17–November 26, 1989. (Catalogue) Chuck Close, Art Institute of Chicago, February 4–April 16, 1989. Traveled to: The Friends of Photography, Ansel Adams Center, San Francisco, November 8, 1989–January 7, 1990. (Catalogue) 1988 Works of Paper by Chuck Close, Tomasulo Art Gallery, Union City College, Cranford, New Jersey, December 2–23, 1998. Chuck Close: Photographs, Fendrick Gallery, Washington, D.C., November 1–December 3, 1988. Chuck Close: Prints and Photographs, Pace Editions, New York, September 23–October 22, 1988. Chuck Close: New Paintings, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, September 23–October 22, 1988. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: A Survey, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, September 23–October 22, 1988. 1987 Chuck Close Drawings, 1974–1986, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, June 19–July 24, 1987. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Photographs, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut, March 1–May 10, 1987. 1986 Chuck Close: New Etchings, Pace Editions, New York, February 21–March 22, 1986. Chuck Close: Recent Work, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, February 21–March 22, 1986. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Maquettes, Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, January 9–February 15, 1986. 1985 Chuck Close: Large Scale Photographs, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, June 26–July 27, 1985. Chuck Close, Fuji Television Gallery, Tokyo, March 1–30, 1985. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Works on Paper, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, February 9–April 21, 1985. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Photographs, Pace/ MacGill Gallery, New York, January 12–February 16, 1985. 1984 Chuck Close: An Exhibition of Handmade Paper Works, Herbert Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles, February 4–March 16, 1984. Traveled as Chuck Close: Handmade Paper Editions to: Spokane Center of Art, Cheney, Washington, April 5–May 12, 1984; Milwaukee Art Museum, June 1–September 30, 1984; Columbia Museum, South Carolina, November 18, 1984–January 13, 1985. 1983 Chuck Close: Recent Editions, Pace Editions, New York, February 26–March 26, 1983. Chuck Close: Recent Work, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, February 25–March 26, 1983. (Catalogue) 1982 Chuck Close: Paperworks, Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, September–October 1982. Traveled to: John Stoller Gallery, Minneapolis, October–November 1982; Jacksonville Art Museum, Florida, December 9, 1982–January 23, 1983; Greenberg Gallery, St. Louis, September 10–October 15, 1983. Chuck Close: Matrix/Berkeley 50, University Art Museum, Berkeley, California, March 3–May 5, 1982. Traveled as Chuck Close: Polaroid Photographs to: California Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside, May 14–July 31, 1982. (Catalogue) 1981 Chuck Close: Etchings, Lithographs and Handmade Paper, Pace Editions, New York, October–November, 1981. 

1980 Close Portraits, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, September 28–November 16, 1980. Traveled to: St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri, December 5, 1980–January 25, 1981; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, February 6–March 29, 1981; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, April 14–June 21, 1981. (Catalogue) 1979 Chuck Close: Recent Work, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, October 26–November 24, 1979. (Catalogue) Chuck Close, Kunstraum München, June 28–July 21, 1979. (Catalogue) 1977 Chuck Close/Matrix 35, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, November 1, 1977–January 29, 1978. (Catalogue) Chuck Close: Recent Work, The Pace Gallery, 32 East 57th Street, New York, April 30–June 4, 1977. (Catalogue) 1975 Chuck Close: Drawings and Paintings, Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Oregon, September 26–October 26, 1975. Chuck Close: Dot Drawings 1973–75, Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, June 17–July 20, 1975. Traveled to: Texas Gallery, Houston, July 22–August 16, 1975; Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, August 19–September 20, 1975; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, December 10, 1975–January 25, 1976; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, February 22–March 5, 1976; Baltimore Museum of Art, April 6–May 30, 1976. (Catalogue) Chuck Close, Bykert Gallery, New York, April 5–24, 1975. Chuck Close: Keith, Organized by Parasol Press, Ltd., New York. Traveled to: Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, North Carolina, January 5–February 2, 1975, Ball State University Art Gallery, Muncie, Indiana; Phoenix Art Museum, June 1–29, 1975; The Minneapolis Institute of Art, July 18–August 31, 1975. 1973 Chuck Close: Recent Works, Bykert Gallery, New York, October 20–November 15, 1973. Chuck Close, Akron Art Museum, Ohio, March 31–May 6, 1973. 1972 Chuck Close, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, February 5–March 19, 1972. (Catalogue) 1971 Chuck Close: Recent Work, Bykert Gallery, New York, December 4, 1971–January 5, 1972. Chuck Close: Recent Work, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, September 21–November 14, 1971. (Catalogue) 1970 Chuck Close, Bykert Gallery, New York, February 28–March 28, 1970. 1967 Charles Close, University of Massachusetts Art Gallery, Amherst, January 8–February 1, 1967. 

Chuck Close BiographyPainter, Educator (1940–)

QUICK FACTSNAME

Chuck Close

OCCUPATION

Painter, Educator

BIRTH DATE

July 5, 1940 (age 75)

EDUCATION

University of Washington School of Art,Yale University School of Art and Architecture

PLACE OF BIRTH

Monroe, Washington

AKA

Chuck Close

FULL NAME

Charles Thomas Close

ZODIAC SIGN

Cancer

Chuck Close is noted for his highly inventive techniques used to paint the human face. He rose to fame in the late 1960s for his large-scale, photo-realist portraits.QUOTES

“I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.”

—Chuck Close

SynopsisChuck Close was born on July 5, 1940, in Monroe, Washington. Suffering from severe dyslexia, Close did poorly in school but found solace in making art. After earning his MFA from Yale in 1964, Close took his place atop the American art world by creating large-scale, photorealist portraits that have creatively blurred the distinction between photography and painting.

Early LifeCharles Thomas Close was born July 5, 1940, in Monroe, Washington. The son of artistic parents who showed great support of their boy's early creative interests, Close, who suffers from severe dyslexia, struggled in almost all phases of schoolwork except art. He was not terribly popular in school, and his problems were furthered by a neuromuscular condition that prevented him from playing sports.

For the first decade of his life, Close's childhood was more or less stable. But when he was 11, tragedy struck, when his father died and his mother fell ill with breast cancer. Close's own health took a terrible turn around this time as well, when a kidney infection landed him in bed for almost a year.

Through all of this, however, Close deepened his love for painting and art in general. At the age of 14, he saw an exhibition of Jackson Pollock paintings. Pollock's style and flair had a great impact on Close, and, as he later recounted, it made him determined to become an artist.

Education and Early WorkClose eventually enrolled at the University of Washington, graduating in 1962 and immediately heading east to Yale to study for a Master of Fine Arts from the university's Art and Architecture School.

Steeped heavily in the abstract world, Close radically changed his focus at Yale, opting for what would become his signature style: photorealism. Using a process he came to describe as "knitting," Close created large-format Polaroids of models that he then re-created on large canvases. 

This early work was bold, intimate and up-front, replicating the particular details of his selected faces, a fact made all the more compelling when considering that Close also suffers from the neurological condition prosopagnosia, or face-blindness, which prevents him from recognizing faces. In addition, his pieces blurred the distinction between painting and photography in a way that had never been done before. His techniques too were noteworthy, in particular his application of color, which helped pave the way for the development of the inkjet printer.

By the late 1960s, Close and his photorealist pieces were entrenched in the New York City art scene. One of his best-known subjects from that period was of another young artistic talent, composer Philip Glass, whose portrait Close painted and showed in 1969. It has since gone on to become one of his most recognized pieces. He later painted choreographer Merce Cunninghamand former President Bill Clinton, among others.

By the 1970s, Close's work was shown in the world's finest galleries, and he was widely considered one of America's best contemporary artists.

Paralysis and PerseveranceIn 1988, Close again experienced the trauma of a severe health issue when he suffered the sudden rupture of a spinal artery. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, Close was left almost entirely paralyzed. Eventually, after rounds of physical therapy, Close, who became permanently confined to a wheelchair, regained the partial use of his limbs.

Despite the physical limitations, Close pressed forward with his work. With a brush taped to his wrist, Close continued to paint, but in a style that was more abstract and less precise. His reputation and standing have not suffered in the least.

In the years since, Close's position atop the American art world remains unchanged, and his work has been met with rave reviews and expensive commissions. In 2000 President Clinton named Close a recipient of the National Medal of Arts. In 2007 his life became the subject of a full-length documentary, Chuck Close: A Portrait in Progress, directed by Marion Cajori. Close and his wife, Leslie, live in New York City and Long Island, New York.

Chuck CloseFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chuck Close

Mark (1978–1979), acrylic on canvas, left; detail of eye, right.[a]

Born Charles Thomas Close

July 5, 1940 (age 75)

Monroe, Washington

Nationality American

Education B.A., University of Washington, 1962; M.F.A., Yale 

University

Known for Photorealistic painter, photographer

Spouse(s) Leslie Rose

Sienna Shields (b. 1976)

Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close (born July 5, 1940) is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as aphotorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Close is known for using creative and intricate patterns to portray a human portrait. Though 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 (on the south shore of Long Island)[1] and New York City's East Village.[2] His first wife was Leslie Rose with whom he has two daughters.[3][4] They divorced in 2011 and Close is now married to artist Sienna Shields.[2][5]

Contents  [hide] 

1   Early life and education 2   Work

o 2.1   Style o 2.2   "The Event" o 2.3   Prints o 2.4   Tapestries o 2.5   Commissions

3   Exhibitions 4   Collections 5   Recognition 6   Art market 7   Fundraising and community service 8   In the media 9   See also 10   Notes 11   References 12   Sources 13   External links

Early life and education[edit]

Chuck Close was born in Monroe, Washington.[6] His father, Leslie Durward Close, died when he was eleven years old. His mother's name was Mildred Wagner Close.[7]

Most of his early works are very large portraits based on photographs (Photorealism or Hyperrealism technique) of family and friends, often other artists. Chuck suffers fromprosopagnosia (face blindness) and has suggested that this condition is what first inspired him to do portraits.[8] In an interview with Phong Bui in The Brooklyn Rail, Close describes an early encounter with a Jackson Pollock painting at the Seattle Art Museum: "I went to the Seattle Art Museum with my mother for the first time when I was 14.[9] I saw this Jackson Pollock drip painting with aluminum paint, tar, gravel and all that stuff. I was absolutely outraged, disturbed. It was so far removed from what I thought art was. However, within 2 or 3 days, I was dripping paint all over my old paintings. In a way I've been chasing that experience ever since."[10]

Close attended Everett Community College in 1958–60.[11] Notable Snohomish County resident, author John Patric, was an early intellectual influence on Chuck Close.[12] In 1962, Close received his B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle. In 1961 he won a coveted scholarship to the Yale

Summer School of Music and Art,[11] and the following year entered the graduate degree program at Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1964. Among Close's classmates at Yale were Brice Marden, Vija Celmins,Janet Fish, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Jennifer Bartlett, Robert Mangold, and Sylvia Plimack Mangold.[1] After Yale, he studied at Academy of Fine Arts Vienna for a while on aFulbright grant.[13] When he returned to the US, he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts. Close came to New York City in 1967 and established himself inSoHo.[1]

Work[edit]

Style[edit]Throughout his career, Close has endeavored to expand his contribution to portraiture through the mastery of such varied drawing and painting techniques as ink, graphite, pastel, watercolor, conté crayon, finger painting, and stamp-pad ink on paper; printmaking techniques, such as Mezzotint, etching, woodcuts, linocuts, and silkscreens; as well as handmade paper collage, Polaroid photographs, Daguerreotypes, and Jacquard tapestries.[14] His early airbrush techniques inspired the development of the ink jet printer.[15]

Close had been known for his skillful brushwork as a graduate student at Yale University. There, he emulated Willem de Kooning and seemed "destined to become a third-generation abstract expressionist, although with a dash of Pop iconoclasm".[1] After a period in which he experimented with figurative constructions, Close began a series of paintings derived from black-and-white photographs of a female nude, which he copied onto canvas and painted in color. [16] As he explained in a 2009 interview with the Cleveland Ohio Plain Dealer, he made a choice in 1967 to make art hard for himself and force a personal artistic breakthrough by abandoning the paintbrush. "I threw away my tools", Close said. "I chose to do things I had no facility with. The choice not to do something is in a funny way more positive than the choice to do something. If you impose a limit to not do something you've done before, it will push you to where you've never gone before."[17] One photo of Philip Glass was included in his resulting black-and-white series in 1969, redone with watercolors in 1977, again redone with stamp pad and fingerprints in 1978, and also done as gray handmade paper in 1982.

Working from a gridded photograph, he builds his images by applying one careful stroke after another in multi-colors or grayscale. He works methodically, starting his loose but regular grid from the left hand corner of the canvas.[18] His works are generally larger than life and highly focused.[19] "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs. The everyday nature of the subject matter of the paintings likewise worked to secure the painting as a realist object."[20]

Close suffers from prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, in which he is unable to recognize faces. By painting portraits, he is better able to recognize and remember faces.[21] On the subject, Close has said, "I was not conscious of making a decision to paint portraits because I have difficulty recognizing faces. That occurred to me twenty years after the fact when I looked at why I was still painting portraits, why that still had urgency for me. I began to realize that it has sustained me for so long because I have difficulty in recognizing faces."[22]

Lucas I (1986–1987), oil & pencil on canvas, seen on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, left. Detail of

eye, right. The pencil grid and thin undercoat of blue is visible beneath the splotchy "pixels." The painting's

subject is fellow artist Lucas Samaras.

Although his later paintings differ in method from his earlier canvases, the preliminary process remains the same. To create his grid work copies of photos, Close puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell. Typically, each square within the grid is filled with roughly executed regions of color (usually consisting of painted rings on a contrasting background) which give the cell a perceived 'average' hue which makes sense from a distance. His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. His first picture with this method was Big Self Portrait, a black and white enlargement of his face to a 107.5 by 83.5 inches (273 cm × 212 cm) canvas, made in over four months in 1968, and acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1969. He made seven more black and white portraits during this period. He 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.

Later work has branched into non-rectangular grids, topographic map style regions of similar colors, CMYK color grid work, and using larger grids to make the cell by cell nature of his work obvious even in small reproductions. The Big Self Portrait is so finely done that even a full page reproduction in an art book is still indistinguishable from a regular photograph.

"The Event"[edit]On December 7, 1988, Close felt a strange pain in his chest. That day he was at a ceremony honoring local artists in New York City and was waiting to be called to the podium to present an award. Close delivered his speech and then made his way across the street to Beth Israel Medical Centerwhere he suffered a seizure which left him paralyzed from the neck down. The cause was diagnosed as a spinal artery collapse.[23] He had also suffered from neuromuscular problems as a child.[24] Close called that day "The Event". For months, 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. He has relied on a wheelchair ever since. Close spoke candidly about the impact disability had on his life and work in the bookChronicles of Courage: Very Special Artists written by Jean Kennedy Smith and George Plimpton and published by Random House.[25]

However, Close continued to paint with a brush strapped onto his wrist with tape, creating large portraits in low-resolution grid squares created by an assistant. Viewed from afar, these squares appear as a single, unified image which attempt photo-reality, albeit in pixelated form. Although the paralysis restricted his ability to paint as meticulously as before, Close had, in a sense, placed artificial restrictions upon his hyperrealist approach well before the injury. That is, he adopted materials and techniques that did not lend themselves well to achieving a photorealistic effect. Small bits of irregular paper or inked fingerprints were used as media to achieve astoundingly realistic and

interesting results. Close proved able to create his desired effects even with the most difficult of materials to control. Close has made a practice, over recent years, of representing artists who are similarly invested in portraiture, like Cecily Brown, Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, and Zhang Huan.[26]

Prints[edit]Close has been a printmaker throughout his career, with most of his prints published by Pace Editions, New York.[11] He 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. To accommodate him, Crown Point found the largest copper plate it could (36 inches wide) and purchased a new press, allowing Close to make a work that was 3 feet by 4 feet. In 1986 he went to Kyoto to work with Tadashi Toda, a highly respected woodblock printer. [27]

In 1995, curator Colin Westerbeck used a grant from the Lannan Foundation to bring Close together with Grant Romer, director of conservation at the George Eastman House.[15] Ever since, the artist has also continued to explore difficult photographic processes such as daguerreotype in collaboration with Jerry Spagnoli and sophisticated modular/cell-based forms such as tapestry. Close's photogravure portrait of artist Robert Rauschenberg, “Robert” (1998), appeared in a 2009 exhibition at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York, featuring prints from Universal Limited Art Editions.[28] In the daguerreotype photographs, the background defines the limit of the image plane as well as the outline of the subject, with the inky pitch-black setting off the light, reflective quality of the subject's face.[29]

In a 2014 interview with Terrie Sultan, Close said: "I’ve had two great collaborators in the God knows how many years I’ve been making prints. One was the late Joe Wilfer, who was called the ‘prince of pulp’’ … and now I’m working with Don Farnsworth in Oakland at…Magnolia Editions: I do the watercolor prints with him, I do the tapestries with him. These are the most important collaborations of my life as an artist."[30]

Since 2012, Magnolia Editions has published an ongoing series of archival watercolor prints by Close which use the artist's grid format and the precision afforded by contemporary digital printers to layer water-based pigment on Hahnemuhle rag paper[31] such that the native behavior of watercolor is manifested in each print: "The edges of each pixel bleed with cyan, magenta, and yellow, creating a kind of three-dimensional fog effect behind the intended color swatches." [32] The watercolor prints are created using more than 10,000 of Close's hand-painted marks which were scanned into a computer and then digitally rearranged and layered by the artist using his signature grid. [33] These works have been called Close's first major foray into digital imagery:[34] according to Close, “It's amazing how precise a computer can be working with light and color and water.” [35] A New York Times review notes that the "exaggerated breakdown of the image, particularly when viewed at close range," that characterizes Close's work "is also apparent in... [watercolor print] portraits of the artists Cecily Brown, Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker and Zhang Huan."[36]

Tapestries[edit]Close's wall-size tapestry portraits, in which each image is composed of thousands of combinations of woven colored thread, depict subjects including Kate Moss, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Lucas Samaras, Philip Glass, Lou Reed, Roy Lichtenstein, and Close himself.[36] They are produced in collaboration with Donald Farnsworth ofMagnolia Editions in Oakland, CA.[37] Although many are translated from black-and-white daguerreotypes, all of the tapestries use multiple colors of thread. No printing is involved in their creation; colors and values appear to the viewer based on combinations of more than 17,800 colored warp (vertical) and weft (horizontal) threads, in an echo of Close's typical grid format.[38][39] Close's tapestry series began with a 2003 black-and-white portrait of Philip Glass; his most recent tapestries are two color self-portraits, debuted at Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, New York in August, 2013.[31] Reviewing this exhibition, Marion Weiss writes: "Close's Jacquard tapestries are not obviously fragmented, but are created by repeating multicolor warp and

weft threads that are optically blended. Thus, portraits of Lou Reed and Roy Lichtenstein, for example, seem 'whole.' It's only when we get closer that we see the individual threads, which are woven together."[40]

Commissions[edit]In 2010, Close was commissioned to create twelve large mosaics, totaling more than 2,000 square feet (190 m2), for the under construction 86th Street subway station on theIND Second Avenue Line in Manhattan.[41][42]

Vanity Fair's 20th Annual Hollywood edition in March 2014 featured a portfolio of 20 Polaroid portraits of movie stars shot by Close, including Robert De Niro, Scarlett Johansson,Helen Mirren, Julia Roberts and Oprah Winfrey. Close requested that his subjects be ready to be photographed without makeup or hair-styling and used a large-format 20x24" Polaroid camera for the close-ups.[43]

Exhibitions[edit]

Chuck Close's very first solo exhibition, held in 1967 at the University of Massachusetts Art Gallery, Amherst, featured paintings, painted reliefs and drawings based on photographs of record covers and magazine illustrations. The exhibition captured the attention of the university administration, which promptly closed it, citing the male nudity as obscene. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) came to the defense of Close, and a landmark court case ensued. A Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice decided in favor of the artist against the university. When the university appealed, Close chose not to return to Boston, and ultimately the decision was overturned by an appeals court.[44] (Close was later awarded an Honorary Doctorate of the Arts by the University of Massachusetts in 1995.)[44]

Close credits the Walker Art Center and its then-director Martin Friedman for launching his career with the purchase of Big Self-Portrait (1967–1968)[45] in 1969, the first painting he ever sold[46] His first one-man show in New York was in 1970, at Bykert Gallery. His first print was the focus of a "Projects" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972. In 1979 his work was included in the Whitney Biennial, and the following year his portraits were the subject of an exhibition at the Walker Art Center. His work has since been the subject of more than 150 solo exhibitions including a number of major museum retrospectives.[13] After Close abruptly canceled a major show of his work scheduled for 1997 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[47] the Museum of Modern Art announced that it would present a major midcareer retrospective of the artist's work in 1998 (curated by Kirk Varnedoe, and later travelling to, among others, the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1999).[48][49] In 2003 the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston presented a survey of his prints, which travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the following year.[13] His most recent retrospective – "Chuck Close Paintings: 1968 / 2006", at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid in 2007 – travelled to the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst in Aachen, Germany, and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has also participated in almost 800 group exhibitions,[50] including documentas V (1972) and VI (1977), the Venice Biennale (1993, 1995, 2003), and theCarnegie International (1995).[29]

In 2013, Close's work was featured in an exhibit in White Cube Bermondsey, London. "Process and Collaboration" displayed not only a number of finished prints and paintings, but included plates, woodblocks and mylar stencils which were used to produce a number of prints.[51]

In December 2014, his work was exhibited in Australia at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, which he visited.[52]

Collections[edit]

Close's work is in the collections of most of the great international museums of contemporary art, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis who published Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967–2005 coauthored with curators Siri Engberg and Madeleine Grynsztejn.[11][53]

Recognition[edit]

The recipient of the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton in 2000,[54] the New York State Governor's Art Award, and the Skowhegan Arts Medal, among many others, Close has received over 20 honorary degrees including one from Yale University, his alma mater.[50] In 1990, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician, and became a full Academician in 1992. New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appointed the artist to the Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission, a body mandated by the City Charter to advise the mayor and the cultural affairs commissioner.[55] Close painted President Bill Clinton in 2006 and photographed President Barack Obama in 2012.[44] In 2010 he was appointed by Obama to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.[13]

In 2005, composer Philip Glass wrote a musical portrait of Close. The composition, a 15-minute piece for solo piano, was the idea of Bruce Levingston, a concert pianist, who commissioned it through the Premiere Commission and who performed the piece at a recital at Alice Tully Hall that year.[56]

Art market[edit]

Close has been represented by The Pace Gallery, in New York since 1977, and by White Cube, London, since 1999.[57] Already in 1999, Close's Cindy II (1988), a portrait of the photographer Cindy Sherman sold for $1.2 million, against a high estimate of $800,000.[58] In 2005, John (1971–72) was sold at Sotheby's to the Broad Art Foundation for $4.8 million.[59]

Fundraising and community service[edit]

In 2007 Close was honored by the New York Stem Cell Foundation and donated artwork for an exclusive online auction.[60]

In September 2012 Magnolia Editions published two tapestry editions and three print editions by Close depicting President Barack Obama. The first tapestry was unveiled at theMint Museum in North Carolina in honor of the Democratic National Convention. These tapestries and prints were sold as a fundraiser to support the Obama Victory Fund. A number of the works were signed by both Close and Obama. Close has previously sold work at auction to raise funds for the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore.[61][62]

In October 2013, 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.[63] In the same year work by Close was also sold to benefit the Lunchbox Fund.[64]

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. 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 U.S. Department of Education and the White House Domestic Policy Council. Close was honored by mayor Bill Finch with a key to the city at the November 7 reception at the Housatonic Community College Museum of Art, where five of Close's watercolor prints were exhibited alongside artwork by students participating in the program.[65]

In the media[edit]

In 1998, PBS broadcast documentary filmmaker Marion Cajori's Emmy-nominated short, “Chuck Close: A Portrait in Progress.”[66] In 2007, Cajori made “Chuck Close", a full-length expansion of the first film.[67] British art critic Christopher Finch wrote a biography, Chuck Close: Life, which was published in 2010, a sequel of sorts to Finch's 2007 book,Chuck Close: Work, a career-spanning monograph.[68]

Close appeared on The Colbert Report on August 12, 2010, where he admitted he watches the show every nigh

Art

The Observer

Head masterChuck Close is one of America's most influential - and most collectable - artists. His gigantic mosaic-patterned paintings helped reinvent the art of portraiture, and now sell for up to $5m each. Here, he talks to Sean O'Hagan about his first easel, the unexpected blessings of dyslexia and why being in a wheelchair is no bar to painting 9ft canvases

Saturday 8 October 2005 20.52 EDT

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When Chuck Close was five years old, his parents asked him what he wanted for Christmas. He told them he wanted an easel. His father, a handyman for the American Air Force, set about making one from scratch.

'It was,' says Chuck, 60 years later, his eyes brightening at the memory, 'a really good easel.' He used to look at it and wish he had some paints. 'Times were tough back then,' he recalls. 'We lived on a housing project next the air base. My parents didn't have a lot of money. Then I saw this wooden box of oil paints in the Sears' catalogue. Man, I wanted that box so bad.'

He wanted it so badly that he can still recall the make: 'It was a Genuine Weber's Oil Color Set, with a small white palette included.'

In Martin Friedman's new book, Close Reading, a kind of friendly critical homage to the artist, Chuck recalls that first painting set with a Proustian relish. 'I can still, to this day, smell the cheap linseed oil in the tubes of paint. They were fat tubes, not little skinny ones. I knew, even then, that the little skinny tubes were for dilettantes.'

This anecdote is one of several that Chuck Close has at hand to illustrate his childhood sense of destiny, as well as the single-mindedness and unshakeable self-belief that has underpinned his life and work ever since. 'I know guys in their forties who are still trying to figure out what to do with their lives,' he says, shaking his head. 'I knew from the age of five what I wanted to do. The one thing I could do was draw. I couldn't draw that much better than some of the other kids, but I cared more and I wanted it badly. I have always distinguished myself,' he says, not boastfully, but matter-of-factly, 'by being hungrier and being totally committed in an absolutely straight line.'

That straight line has led Chuck Close to where - and what - he is today, an artist who has created a signature style as instantly recognisable as anyone's since Andy Warhol, one of his heroes. In

the process, he has become rich beyond his wildest childhood dreams. The half-finished self-portrait that is mounted diagonally on the back wall of his studio will eventually enter the global art market with a six-figure price tag attached. An early Chuck Close portrait recently sold at Sotheby's for $4.8m.

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'No one was more surprised than me when my paintings started selling, except maybe my dealer,' says Chuck, laughing his big hearty laugh, head back, eyes closed. 'There was a time I could barely get them into a gallery. When I started doing heads in the Sixties, I'd spend four months on a painting and, if I was really lucky, it'd go for thirteen hundred bucks. Even then, that was cheap.'

Heads are what Chuck has done ever since. He calls them 'Heads' because when he started painting them portraiture was 'viewed as a bankrupt form, dead in the water'. Chuck's heads have defied the dictates of fashion for nigh-on four decades now, attaining a kind of iconic status not least through their similarity. Chuck famously paints from photographs rather than from life. 'A photograph doesn't gain weight or lose weight,' he says, 'or change from being happy to being sad. It's frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.'

He is an artist obsessed with the process of making art, as much as with the result. Each photograph is gridded into tiny squares or diamonds, and the canvas, in turn, gridded on a correspondingly larger scale. Bit by bit, Chuck fills in the tiny squares or diamonds with shapes and colours until, out of a matrix of multicoloured squares, ovals and oblongs, a huge face emerges. His critics say that one Chuck Close portrait looks much like another, but you could just as easily say that Chuck's childhood single-mindedness has evolved into a Zen uniformity of vision that is compelling in its seeming sameness.

'There's an obsessiveness there that is extraordinary,' says Tim Marlow, British art historian and director of exhibitions for London's White Cube gallery. 'It has made him a kind of lone figure in contemporary art - no one else is doing what he is doing. He has reinvented portraiture through the medium of paint, but also abstracted it. He's a painter's painter, but his reputation is still growing. I'd put him among the top 10 most important American artists since abstract expressionism, no question.'

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Interestingly, Chuck paints his own face a lot, too: the big bald head, the Lennon specs, the neatly trimmed goatee. He has made his own face iconic. He also paints portraits of his friends, many of whom seem to be fellow artists: Francesco Clemente, Cindy Sherman, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns. Way back in the Sixties, one of the first heads Chuck painted belonged to the avant-garde musician Philip Glass, who was not so well known back then. To Glass's surprise - and Close's - the painting was bought by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the postcard of it became one of their bestselling items.

'It kept showing up everywhere,' Glass recalled recently. 'I told Chuck I never took the painting personally because it was like Monet and the haystacks. I was just a haystack.'

We are sitting at a long table full of books, papers, photographs and lists, in Chuck's big, white, and otherwise uncluttered studio in downtown Manhattan, near the Bowery. This is Chuck's turf and, like him, the neighbourhood has undergone a huge change of fortune in the past three decades, from a low rent, no-go zone full of bums and bohos to the salubrious and fashionable quarter it is today.

Chuck whizzes around his studio in a motorised wheelchair, barking orders at his two assistants. In person, he is fearsome and funny by turns, still a big, imposing bear of a man who bristles with

impatient energy, even though he has been wheelchair-bound for 17 years. On 7 December 1988, at a ceremony in New York to honour local artists, Chuck was about to present a prize when he felt an intense pain in his back. By the time he had staggered off the podium, the pain had spread into his chest and down his arms. He walked across the road to the Beth Israel Medical Center, where he lay down and suffered a 20-minute seizure. In the previous months, he had been plagued by memory lapses and odd feelings of blankness, but this was much more serious: a collapsed spinal artery.

For a time, Chuck was paralysed from the shoulders down. He can now move his arms and, with some effort, his hands, but his fingers remain immobile. He paints with a brush attached by a harness to his wrist, and uses foot pedals to move his 9ft sq canvases up and down through a long slit in the floor so he is always at eye level with what º ª he is painting. That single-mindedness again.

'My first thought when I came out of hospital was that I might have to do conceptual work and have someone else execute my ideas, and that made me profoundly sad. Physicality is so important to me in my work. Pushing paint around, that's what I do. But whatever it takes to get there, I'll do it. That's always been my way of thinking.'

Chuck Close is one of life's combative optimists, and his creative ambition - most evident in the epic scale on which he works - remains undented by his relative immobility. Though he talks 19 to the dozen, he tends to brush aside direct questions about his disability, and has said before that he considers himself 'lucky' to be still able to do what he did before his illness. 'There's no big difference in the work, really,' he says, 'except maybe emotionally. I'd say it's a little more emotional now, a little more celebratory. The first painting I did after hospital was a little painting of my friend, Alex Katz. It's profoundly sad-looking, even though the photograph I took of him wasn't. But, it's also a brighter palette. It

kind of embodies the dichotomy I was feeling at the time: loss, and a great happiness to be back at work against the odds.'

He describes the housing project in Tacoma, Washington State where he grew up as a place where 'people thought themselves lucky if they had a regular job'. His parents, though, were different. They gave him all the encouragement he needed to pursue painting. 'My mother was a piano teacher, my father an inventor. He invented the reflective paint they still use on airstrips. They had faith in my ambition, and I think that made all the difference. I always used to say it was, "Go to Yale or go to jail," and there was some truth in that. I had no fallback. If art didn't work, I was fucked.'

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Despite his dyslexia, which went undiagnosed for a long time, Chuck won a scholarship to the Yale summer school and then Yale proper, where his classmates in the early Sixties included the artists Richard Serra and Michael Craig-Martin. It was the era when abstract expressionism, the great big, messy, macho American style of painting, was on the wane, but its influence lingered. 'Abstract expressionism depended on the rendering of angst,' says Chuck, laughing, 'and I didn't have any angst. I hadn't suffered. In a way, we were just imitating the surface of all that stuff, Pollock and so on, and there's nothing worse than fake angst.'

While at Yale, Chuck remembers going out drinking with two of his tutors, Jack Tworkov and Philip Guston, abstract expressionists both, the latter having not yet pulled off his spectacular reinvention as a raw figurative artist.

'We'd go to the Old Heidelberg in New Haven and drink strong German beer into the night. One time we got really drunk and they both started crying. There's Jack on one side, wailing, "I ain't sold a goddamn painting in a year and a half" and Philip on the other, going, "I haven't sold one in two goddamn years." And me in the

middle, just devastated. But they reinvented themselves.' He grins, his eyes light up. 'They came back stronger. That was the most important lesson of all for me.'

Later, Chuck would do the same. He stopped making abstract work and in 1966 started painting big portraits from photographs.

'It was a time of theoretical ferment. Everyone of my generation was trying to start over, trying to figure out what they were doing. America was on fire - Vietnam, the assassinations. We were a product of all that but we did not attempt to make directly political work. It seeped in in other ways, in this questioning of everything you took for granted. The Sixties to me was one big question.'

His answer was, as he puts it, 'to make forward-looking, modernist representational paintings, including portraits, that were just as rigorous and tough and unlikeable as abstraction'.

In 1967, he moved to New York. His first major work was Big Self-Portrait, a monochrome ultra-realist painting that has since become one of contemporary art's iconic images. In it, he looks both cool and nerdy, perhaps stoned, his tousled hair framing eyes that stare impassively at the viewer from behind geek spectacles. A half-smoked cigarette sticks out the side of his mouth beneath big nostrils and a sprouting moustache. It's an image that is utterly of its time, yet possesses a strange contemporaneity. 'I was in there early with the grunge look,' he says, grinning.

Was it a natural pose or a created one? 'Oh, created. Totally. I didn't want it to look flattering or distinguished like a traditional portrait. It was an effort to put mileage between me and what portraiture had become. Hence the shirt coming off, the cigarette, the stubble. Clement Greenberg had said that there was one thing an artist could not do any more and that was paint a portrait. I thought, that's good, that'll keep the competition down. I just dived in there, I guess, tried to make it new again.'

It took some time, though, before Chuck Close's 'heads' were looked upon as something new; longer still for Chuck, himself, to admit that his 'heads' were actually portraits. 'I was asked to do the Artist's Choice show for MoMA when I came out of hospital, where you select works you love from their collection. I found hundreds of portraits, and they were so not what you expected of modernism. That's when I realised I'd been fooling myself, that I was a portrait painter all along, I was the caboose of the train of portraiture.'

Over the years, Chuck's heads have become bigger and brighter, somehow more real and yet more unreal. His latest gargantuan self-portrait looks like a pixellated colour photograph, but the closer you move towards it, the more abstract it becomes, until you might as well be staring at a formalist landscape of colours and patterns. We look at it together. 'The strange thing is,' he says, 'I don't know what a face looks like unless it's flattened out. That's one of the things about my learning disability. That's why the photograph works for me. In real life, if I saw you again tomorrow, I would have no idea I had seen you before.'

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I think about this for a while, and it makes what I am looking at even more extraordinary. Likewise, the man who created it. 'Painting for me is like putting rocks in your shoes before you go out on a journey,' he says. 'It's about making things a little more difficult for yourself so that you know where you are going, but you never really know how you're going to get there. They used to say that Pollock didn't know what his next painting was going to look like, but he did know what he was going to do in the studio that day. Me, I know what my next painting is going to look like, but I don't know what I'm going to do in the studio to get there. I'm just trying to inch nearer all the time.'

· Chuck Close is featured in the exhibition Self Portrait: Renaissance to Contemporary at the National Portrait Gallery from

20 October, and is in conversation with Tim Marlow on 21 October. Close Reading: Chuck Close and the Artist Portrait by Martin Friedman is published by Abrams at £24.95

Available in Our LibraryChuck Close: A Portrait in ProgressVideotape, 1997 Produced, directed, and written by Marion CajoriFor 40 years, Chuck Close has blasted his huge hyper-real images into elemental partsand then reassembled into revealing facial maps. He photographs his subjects, blows up the image, divides it into a detailed grid and then uses colors and patterns to reconstruct the face. Up close the portraits are abstract, a series of tiny paintings filling the squares of the grid. It's a bit like pixilization: The whole indeed is greater than the sum of its parts. Step back, the paintings become magical and sometimes brutal mugshots of Close's family, friends and fellow artists.Close's drawings, paintings, photographs and prints have been the subject of more than 100 exhibitions in over 20 countries. In this 57-minute documentary, he's wonderfully articulate about his work and his influences. He says he was so empowered by Willem de Kooning that "I was de Kooning." Later, he had to purge the influence as his own artistic identity grew. 

Close, 68, has been painting for the last 20 years from a wheelchair. A spinal artery collapse paralyzed him in 1988. Of course as a very successful artist, he feared he would not be able to paint again. While rehabbing at New York's Rusk Institute, an OT set up a studio in the basement so Close could get back to work. His hand function came back; he can hold a brush with a splinted right hand. He still works with huge canvases; motors move them around so Close can paint from his chair. He's still at the top of his game.

In this video, Close talks about his process, his disability, his work style. It's a compelling documentary that includes appearances by contemporary New York artists Leslie Close (his wife), Philip Glass, Mark Greenwold, Alex Katz, Dorothea Rockburne, and Kiki Smith

About the Art

Chuck Close is associated with the style of painting called Photorealismor Superrealism. In this style, artists in the early 1970s created a link between representational systems of painting and photography. Photorealism developed as a reaction to the detachment of Minimalismand conceptual art, which did not depict representational images. Photorealists frequently used a grid technique to enlarge a photograph and reduce each square to formal elements of design. Each grid was its own little work of art. Many of the Photorealists used the airbrush technique.

Big Self-Portrait, in black and white, was the first of Close's mural-sized works painted from photographs. This painting took four months to complete. To make this work, Close took several photographs of himself in which his head and neck filled the frame. From these he selected one of the images and made two 11 x 14-inch enlargements. On one of the photographs he drew a grid, then lettered and numbered each square. Using both the gridded and ungridded photographs, he carefully transferred the photographic image square by square onto a large canvas measuring 107 1/2 x 83 1/2 inches. He used acrylic paint and an airbrush to include every detail.

When Close was making his painting he was concerned with the visual elements--shapes, textures, volume, shadows, and highlights--of the photograph itself. He also was interested in how a photograph shows some parts of the image in focus, or sharp, and some out-of-focus, or blurry. In this portrait the tip of the cigarette and the hair on the back of his head were both out-of-focus in the photograph so he painted them that way in Big

Self-Portrait.

Artists frequently change their style of work and Close experienced a tragedy that subsequently influenced his painting style. In 1988, he had a spinal blood clot, which left him a quadriplegic, unable to move either his legs or his arms. With a paint brush clamped between his teeth, he developed a new way to paint. His portraits, the photos, and canvases were gridded off by assistants and then he used his mouth brush to paint, using the techniques of grisaille and pointillism within the grids. This is similar to technique used by the Impressionists and Pointillists. The result was still a canvas of mini-paintings, which when viewed from a distance are seen as a single or unified image.Close's new technique is apparent in the second portrait on this page entitled Kiki (right). This painting was made in 1993, 25 years afterBig Self-Portrait . Kiki also took three to four months for the artist to complete.  

Chuck Close, Kiki (detail)

Vocabulary Terms

Photorealism--A style of painting in which an image is created in such exact detail that it looks like a photograph; uses everyday subject matter, and often is larger than life.

representational--Depicts an object in nature in recognizable form.

grisaille--A painting technique using only grey tints.

pointillism--A painting technique in which a white background is covered with tiny dots of pure color that fuse when seen from a distance producing a luminous visual effect.

Minimalism--A style of art in which the least possible amount of form shapes, colors, or lines are used to reduce the concept or idea to its simplest form (geometric shapes, progressions).

Impressionism--A movement in painting in which the emphasis on light and color, loose brush strokes, ordinary subject matter; creates the "impression" of a moment in time. Dabs and strokes of color are used to depict the natural appearances of objects and reflected light.

When he left the UW for Yale in 1962, Close changed his style completely, dumping abstract paintings based on de Kooning in favor or "photorealist" portraits. He turned his back on abstraction in favor of photorealism because he wanted to "find his own voice" and not continue to do work similar to that of his UW mentor, Art Professor Alden Mason. It was a dramatic break: Photorealism is a painting style resembling photography in its close attention to detail, the opposite of abstract expressionism.

His work began to be shown in important New York galleries and at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the late 1960s. In the early 1970s, he was exhibiting in prestigious international exhibitions. By 1980, he was widely recognized as an important figure in contemporary American art. Today, publications surveying contemporary art history routinely discuss his painting and most modern art museums in the U.S. and Western Europe feature his work in their collections.

Chuck Close at work on his 1993 self-portrait. Photo by John Reuter.

He achieved his international reputation by demonstrating that a very traditional art form, portrait painting, could be resurrected as a challenging form of contemporary expression. His work has been superficially described as photo realist, "but is more revealingly positioned with the development of minimalism and process art of the 1960s and 1970s," says Christopher Ozubko, director of the UW School of Art.

Close's large, iconic portraits are generated from a system of marking which involves painstaking replication of the dot system of the mechanical printing process. The portraits he produces--utterly frontal, mural-size, and centered in shallow space--replicate the veracity of a photograph and undermine the objectivity of photography at the same time, critics say.

In the early days, though, his work was the complete opposite of realism. Upon his arrival at the UW from Everett Community College--which back in the 1950s was a feeder for the UW art program--he was influenced heavily by the now-retired Mason. They used to get thick paint by the gallon from a special dealer in Oakland, and churned out lots of abstract works. "It was the opposite of the precise work he is best known for," says Mason. "We just glopped on tons of paint and followed the influence of de Kooning and other New York painters of the time. The brushwork then took a lot of energy, was emotional, hard work, full of anxiety and trauma because it was all improvisational. You had no idea what was going to turn out.

"He had talent and did nice work, but I had no idea he would turn out to be one of the great painters of our time."

Close's big break came when he went to Yale, first for the summer between his junior and senior years and then again for grad school. There, in search of his own voice, he

says he "did all I could to put distance" from his earlier abstract work. So he flipped 180 degrees and started making photo realist works. He used exacting grids from huge, large-frame Polaroid pictures of his models, then recreated the image on canvas in color. It was a process he called "knitting." He painted his friends, his family, himself, all in huge pieces that could cover an entire wall. His works depicted intense close-ups and details, every flaw on every patch of skin, mouth, nasal cavity. His famous 1968 self portrait shows him shirtless, hair askew, a smoldering cigarette off to one side of his mouth, a less than thrilled expression on his face.

His first large-format figurative painting was "Big Nude" (1967-68). Measuring 10 by 22 feet, she was too long to fit into Close's studio unless her feet were folded. She was attractive without being exceptional, naked rather than nude, complete with stretch marks, tan lines, and pores. The model's visible flaws were the marks of her personal distinction and Close's candor. "I was trying to be very flat-footed and effect this translation (of a photograph) and not editorialize and not crank anything up for greater effect," Close says. "But unconsciously, I couldn't help but do it."

He later moved into painting big heads, but his ideas began to change. At first, he was into objective detailing of his subjects in works that could compete with photographs for reality. Then he moved more into color and added some abstractness to the work, using the face as the frame. No longer did you see perfect "photo-mechanical" representations. " The image had dissolution," he says.

That continued in his work after his disability struck--and he has received even more acclaim.

"It is the opposite of the precision work before his disability," Mason says. "It is a great paradox. From far away the paintings look like passport photos but up close, they turn into this mosaic of dozens of different, individual paintings. How he makes it work is magic."

The magic was evident early on in his life when he picked up a drawing pencil or paintbrush. "I was no good at anything else," Close explains. "I could draw, and having an audience was interesting to me. That felt good."

He took private art lessons, drawing and painting from nude models when he was eight. "I was the envy of my classmates," he says.

That continued when he was an Everett.

"He was a premier student, and distinctive because of his chatter," says Russell Day, who was chairman of the Everett art program. "He was very energetic, a show-off,

and very verbal. He was a top student, but back then, in terms of creativity, he didn't show it. He sure does now."

Close went to the UW for the reputation of its art program and because he didn't have any money. In the two years he was there, he shared a house with several other artists, and was known as an energetic, almost possessed painter. He was 6 foot 3 and weighed 210 pounds but hated one flaw: he was bald at 20. "Being bald when you are 20, you're used to never looking the way you want to look, but I thought I had a decent body. I took pleasure in my body," he says.

He also took great pleasure in his work. As a UW student in 1960, he was at a thrift shop near Lake Union when he came across a desecrated U.S. flag. He painted on it, and put on patriotic inscriptions, such as "E Pluribus Unum." The painting drew little reaction while on display at the UW, or even at the Seattle Art Museum as part of the Northwest Annual show. He even won a prize for it. But when it was displayed at the Puyallup Fair, the American Legion objected strenuously. Some legionnaires tried to chop down the door to get at it, and the media coverage was substantial. "It was my 10 little minutes of fame," he says.

Over the years he achieved full-time fame, but his body started showings signs of betraying him well before that terrible day in 1988. Several times in his life, he experienced excruciating pain but doctors couldn't find a reason.

Then came Dec. 7, 1988. He was in his Upper West Side apartment, alone. His wife, Leslie, was at work. Their two daughters, Georgia and Maggie, were at school. The mysterious pain came back and he dropped to the floor. The pain subsided but later, at an event at the mayor's residence, he didn't feel right. He made an award presentation, then promptly left for a nearby hospital.

The doctors didn't know what was going on. He had a long, violent convulsion, his hands and legs flailing about. He had to be held down, and then he stopped moving--yet never lost consciousness. The doctors thought it was a cardiac problem. Days later, he was transferred to the NYU Medical Center. Close was in sorry shape--only the top quarter of each lung worked. His lungs were suctioned every two hours, he could barely breathe, his diaphragm stopped working, his bladder didn't work, his limbs were numb.

Eventually, doctors discovered a blood clot in his spinal column. It was high up in his neck and damaged the spinal cord, causing his paralysis. Had it been an inch higher, he would have died. An inch lower, and he would have minimal paralysis.

"Have you ever been in a car wreck, with the car spinning out of control," he asks. "You know that strange eerie calmness that takes over as you almost go into slow motion? You turn the wheel this way, that way. Only when it's over do you fall apart and go into shock. This was an attenuated, drawn-out case of that, where many days I experienced a profound calmness, eerie even to me."

In early 1989, he began a grueling rehabilitation program but was feeling hopeless. Then his wife insisted that Close get back to painting. At first, he held a brush between his teeth and he could control it enough to paint. "I suddenly became encouraged," he says. "I tried to imagine what kind of teeny paintings I could make with only that much movement. I tried to imagine what those paintings might look like. Even that little bit of neck movement was enough to let me know that perhaps I was not powerless. Perhaps I could do something myself."

Later, he regained some movement in his upper arm, and his therapists fashioned a hand split onto which they could tape a paint brush. At first, he used gloppy poster paint. With great effort, Close drew a primitive grid on the cardboard. He could barely move the upper portion of his arms. He moved the brush around in the paint for as long as he could bear it--usually one or two seconds--and he then attempted to daub it into the space of the grid he made.

It was the birth of a new style that has earned Close fame and fortune equal to what he enjoyed prior to his tragedy.

Chuck Close working on his 1990 portrait of "Elizabeth." A large Polaroid photo of his model is at the left of the canvas. Photo by Bill Jacobson.

He was making lozenge shapes with the paint brush strapped to his hand. "I saw that each grid was in fact a tiny painting," he says. "I thought about making little teeny paintings. I'll paint in my lap little two-inch paintings backed with Velcro and then they'll all go together on the wall like a big jigsaw puzzle. It will eventually build a big picture. I didn't want to lose the scale of my work. This would address the problem of how I'd build a big painting. I'd paint little pictures and then have assistants mount them on the wall."

His work blossomed from there. His paintings this time were much more colorful and the image was much softer. "This was the path I had been on, this dissolution of the image. I realized that all I had done was catch up in my work with where I had been," he says.

His new system of painting added a wide range of brilliant color, and, according to Roger Angell writing in The New Yorker, "a ravaged artist has become, in a miracle, one of the great colorists and brush wielders of his time."

His life is a struggle but it has its rewards. In his custom studio, the boy from Monroe whom no one thought would amount to anything paints dazzling, huge works from his wheelchair, enthralling art enthusiasts and critics alike. * Jon Marmor is associate editor of Columns.

He was big and clumsy and not very athletic. Because he was dyslexic, everyone considered him dumb and lazy. He was told to forget about college. He couldn't play sports because he couldn't keep up with his friends.

But that wasn't the only pain Chuck Close had to deal with in his young life. His father, a sheet metal worker, plumber and on-the-side inventor, was always in ill health and moved the family from Monroe to Everett to Tacoma to Everett in search of civil service jobs with health benefits.

When Close was 11, his life became pure hell. His father died. His mother, a trained pianist who in the Great Depression gave up her aspirations for concert career, got breast cancer. They lost their home because of medical bills. His grandmother was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. And Close, an only child, spent most of the year in bed with nephritis, a nasty kidney infection.

One thing did help him cope with the mind-numbing agony, sadness and misery: art.

He always liked to draw. At age 4, he knew he wanted to be an artist. At the age of 5, his dad made him an easel for his birthday and got him a set of oil paints from Sears.

In an attempt to win friends and "get kids to be around me," he also did magic and puppet shows. He drew and painted. People noticed.

Little did Charles Thomas Close know back then that he would indeed to go to college, graduating not only from the University of Washington in 1962 (magna cum laude) but from Yale as well. Now, at the age of 57, he is one of the true superstars of art. His works hang in the world's most prestigious museums, he is considered by ARTNews magazine to be one of the 50 most influential people in the art world--and he is so big he turned down a major retrospective at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art because promises were broken. He chose the Museum of Modern Art instead. No one can recall an artist ever turning down the Met.

But this is much more than just the story of a local boy who made good. On Dec. 7, 1988, at the age of 49, Close was at the height of his career as a portrait painter when he was stricken with a spinal blood clot that left him a quadriplegic. Many thought his career was over.

As he came to grips with life in a motorized wheelchair, unable to move from the neck down, with little hope for improvement, his biggest fear was that "I was not going to make art. Since I'll never be able to move again, I would not be able to make art. I watched my muscles waste. My hands didn't work."

But like the previous tragedies in his life, that didn't stop him either. He not only returned to painting, but with a new style that has kept his place as one of the great American painters of our time. This month he will receive a new honor to add to the mantle of his Manhattan home--he becomes the 1997 UW Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus, the highest honor an alumnus of the University of Washington can receive.