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Chuck Close receives honors from the Whitney Museum of Modern Art – just one tribute to a larger-than-life portrait artist at the peak of his career.
Since the 1960's American artist Chuck Close took on the challenge of modern portraiture, today he continues to question, to reinterpret and to change the face of modern portraits.
Chuck Close is widely acclaimed for reinventing portraiture with his nine-feet-high paintings of faces, intimate depictions of his family, fellow artists and himself. His first "head" painting was his 'Big Self Portrait' (1968), an ultra-realist black and white self-portrait, hair dishevelled with a cigarette in his mouth. As with all his works, it is based on a Polaroid.
Over the years his usage of a grid system has become more complex, as Close divides his canvas into a mosaic-like myriad of abstract squares, diamonds, oblongs, circles and ovals - thousands of tiny abstract elements combine to make an intriguing, large-scale face.
Today, Close – who never accepts commissions for paintings – is as prolific as ever.
Despite a debilitating illness in 1988 that forces him to paint in a wheelchair, with a paintbrush attached by a harness to his wrist and foot pedals for manoeuvring his canvases, he nevertheless continues to paint obsessively.
With a monograph of his work just published, the Whitney Museum in New York impressively honouring his career and his recent jacquard tapestries, and an autumn solo show at London's White Cube gallery set to travel to St. Petersburg, Russia next spring, Close is an artist more expansive than ever.
How did your painting of Bill Clinton come about?
I've known him for a long time and I photographed him for a project for his re-election in the Oval Office in 1996. He gave me the National Medal for the Arts. This time round I photographed him at his office in Harlem. After that I went to Ambassador Holbrooke's house for Hillary's birthday party, and took along the photographs from the shoot and asked him whether it would be okay if I made the painting. I didn't want to do an unauthorized portrait or use the image without his permission. When I told him I wanted to make a painting, he said okay. I asked him which one he liked best, and luckily he picked the same one I did. Bill Clinton is the most recognizable person I've ever painted and the painting [bought by Canadian businessman Ian M Cumming] is going to the National Gallery in Washington DC.
You photographed Kate Moss for W magazine in 2003 and an edition of your subsequent series of daguerreotypes of her sold at Christie's, London, in May this year for £84,000, five times over its pre-sale estimate. What makes her a fascinating subject?
Kate is probably second only to Marilyn Monroe as the subject most often represented in works of art. By now she may have actually passed her. She was extremely easy to work with: cooperative, comfortable with her nakedness, not vain, had no hair or make-up person with her and seemed comfortable with less-than-flattering images. I anticipated that she would be a diva or prima donna; she was neither. In the four hours that we spent with me photographing her we actually talked most about being a parent and her motherhood.
You've also started making tapestries based on your daguerreotypes. How did you become interested in this?
Years ago I made silk tapestries in China and got very interested in translating an idea into threads. So when the opportunity presented itself to make tapestries with Flanders Tapestries in Belgium, where they've been making tapestries for 500 to 600 years, I jumped at the chance. The idea I liked with the daguerreotypes is that, because of the depth of field in a daguerreotype, there is a lot that is very sharp and a lot that is blurry and fuzzy. And I like seeing how the threads can make something that is blurry and out of focus and also in very sharp relief. But the tapestries aren't just black and white; there are lots of reds and greens and yellows and other colours woven in too. There are 6,000 different colours in colour tapestries and 250 in black-and-white ones. I've tried doing a tapestry based on a painting and I wasn't pleased with how it translated. But that doesn't mean I won't try again!
What was your upbringing like?
It was a lower-middle class, working family. My father was an inventor and my mother was a pianist. My family thought that being an artist was a great thing to be and were interested in making it possible for me. My father got me private art lessons when I was eight.
You studied at Yale in the 1960s, when Alex Katz – now a friend of yours – was teaching there. What was the mood like?
Well, school was pretty conservative. We were being trained to be junior abstract expressionists, making things that looked like Willem De Kooning or Hans Hoffmann. But we were also going to New York, seeing Frank Stella's black stripe paintings and Andy Warhol's first exhibition at the Stable Gallery of his soup cans and stuff. The people that I was at Yale with are like a Who's Who of the art world today – Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Michael Craig-Martin, Nancy Graves, Jennifer Bartlett, Janet Fish. But none of us was doing anything remotely connected to what we're doing now.
You've mentioned that, because of your dyslexia, you have difficulty remembering faces, and that painting them is a way of keeping people in your consciousness.
Yes. Once I've flattened them out I'm able to remember them. I'm just looking at one square at a time. I work from left to right, top to bottom. I clean it up as I go along if I spill some paint on the canvas. It just makes sense: if you can't control something big, you control something small.
In 1988 you suffered from a collapsed spinal artery. Did your illness accelerate the speed that your painting was taking towards a more expressive, open quality?
No, not at all. This new direction was already present in the show that I had just before my illness. When I had an exhibition at the MoMA in 1998, Robert Storr purposefully mixed my paintings together to show how seamless my work was.
You have reinvented portraiture, managing to reconcile descriptive figuration with complex abstraction. What appeals to you about this?
I'm interested in artificiality as much as reality. Artificiality is the flat, individual shapes, and the reality is the image. The two are equally important to me. The fact that individual shapes also make an image is what interests me.
You've always painted from Polaroid photographs. What did you dislike about figure drawing?
We painted figures in school and I never liked how the model might change. One day they'd be happy; the next day they'd be sad. They'd gain weight or lose weight. They'd have their hair cut. And that meant that the painting always changed. First of all, I didn't want people in my studios for months on end. And also it was because of my learning disability: I'm much better transforming something from one flat surface onto another flat surface.
You often depict other artists, like Mark Greenwold, James Turrell and Cindy Sherman, who are also friends of yours.
They're not always best friends but I have to have a significant relationship with them or be involved in a dialogue with them and their work. It's also an opportunity for me to get to know artists from other generations, such as people like Jasper Johns who are heroes from the generation before me or younger artists like Ellen Gallagher.
How you present yourself in your self-portraits has become more introspective. Are you opening yourself up more?
I'm the last one to know that! Now I'm just an old, bald, gray-bearded old man. I'm no longer that James Dean angry young man that I never was anyway! Now I present myself as an old man, and what you see is what you get. The thing is, everyone hates their wrinkles and the bags under their eyes. But everything that they hate about their sagging face is what I like. Everybody wants me to keep that out of the painting and of course that's what I always want to paint! It's more interesting to me than a young person's smooth skin. I like that about my face: it's like an old shoe or an old dog.
Do you see self-portraiture as a way to scrutinize yourself?
Yes. And I like to be as ruthless and as unflattering with myself as I am with other people. If I like wrinkles and bags about everyone else's face, I have to like them about myself too. I like being old! I'm not celebrating it, but I'm enjoying myself. I certainly wouldn't go back.
'Chuck Close: Work' by Christopher Finch is published by Prestel. www.prestel.com. ISBN 978-3-7913-3676-3. Price: £45.00 or US$85.00.
Chuck Close's forthcoming exhibition 'Chuck Close: Seven Portraits' is at the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia, from February 26 through to May 4, 2008. www.hermitagemuseum.org
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