Wednesday, 25 December 2013

CHUCK CLOSE

I don’t try to drain all expression out, I just want a very neutral expression. If you have an extreme expression—either laughing or crying or whatever—then that’s the only content that you will get out of it. Whereas if it’s presented neutrally and flat-footedly, you can read whatever evidence is embedded in their visage, like laugh-lines and furrows or whatever, in the same way that you can make assumptions about people when you meet them at a cocktail party. I am a humanist and I hope that a bit of humanity is in there somewhere; I just don’t like to editorialize it”.

Artist Statement, 2010 Chuck Close, [online]
Available at: < https://artiststatements.wordpress.com/tag/chuck-close/ >
[Accessed 29 October 2013].

The Daguerreotype process directly inspired American artist Chuck Close as one of his main mediums, he is mostly renowned for his portraits done reinterpreting the Daguerreotype process, than he uses grid lines to blow out the portraits in surreal sizes and painting them using various particular techniques which rendered his work unique. Although he had encountered a blood clot which left him almost completely paralyzed, he sough to find techniques enabling him to continue his works of art’s and maintaining his status as one of the current best American artists. Chuck’s main subject is portraits, this came as a result since he had a disability in remembering faces, so he worked on the most influential portraits and of relatively importance for himself.
In his statement above Chuck Close is expressing his style, since photography is one of the easiest mediums in which everyone can actually use a point and shoot camera and achieve a relatively good image, however on the other hand it is one of the hardest to have a particular type of vision and being able to produce it via photography, this is exactly what Chuck Close managed to achieve. His style involves Photorealism and he made it a must not to have editorial kind of work, in the sense of not having any text whatsoever in paintings. His approach was of not producing a perfect portrait without defects, but instead concentrating on showing the road map on the face which shows what kind of life that particular person has had so far, these where shown by the particular features in their faces, like if they laughed very often or frowned these would have been shown by lines those rendering them more realistic humans.







YouTube, 2009. Chuck Close Clip. [online]
[Accessed 29 October 2013].

YouTube, 2011. A&A Portrait - Chuck Close. [online]
[Accessed 29 October 2013].

YouTube, 2012. Chuck Close explains why he follows a grid. [online]
[Accessed 29 October 2013].

YouTube, 2013. Chuck Close: Faces on Canvas • Thomas Feiner: Scars and Glasses. [online] Available at: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HblFiu-ysCU>
[Accessed 29 October 2013].



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