chuck close
THIS GUY IS AWESOME!
end of blog.
......just kidding. chuck close was born in 1940. he specializes in huge gigantic massive portraits, and paints with a photorealistic style. a lot of his portraits are of family and friends, and sometimes other artists too. close is a great admirer of the arts as well as pursuing his own art and has been following and drawing inspiration from other artsts since he was small. for example, once when he was only eleven his mother took him to an art museum where he had an encounter with jackson pollock. about the experience he said this:
THIS GUY IS AWESOME!
end of blog.
......just kidding. chuck close was born in 1940. he specializes in huge gigantic massive portraits, and paints with a photorealistic style. a lot of his portraits are of family and friends, and sometimes other artists too. close is a great admirer of the arts as well as pursuing his own art and has been following and drawing inspiration from other artsts since he was small. for example, once when he was only eleven his mother took him to an art museum where he had an encounter with jackson pollock. about the experience he said this:
"I went to the Seattle Art Museum with my mother for the first time when I was 11. 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."
In 1962, he received his B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle. He then attended graduate school at Yale University, where he received his MFA in 1964. After Yale, he lived in Europe for a while on a Fulbright grant. When he returned to the US, he worked as an art teacher at the University of Massachusetts.
another thing that i found to be very interesting about chuck close is that he suffers from prosopagnosia, or face blindness. i had never even heard of such a thing before, but essentially it is the inability to recognize faces. when he paints portraits, it helps close to remember faces better, which i probably why so many of his works are of close friends and family. close said about this subject:
"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."
like i said. SUCH a cool guy. unfortunately, he suffered a seizure in 1988 that left him paralyzed from the neck down. this hasn't stopped close from still being actively involved in the art world however. he is definitely going to make my top ten artists for closer inspection;)
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