Chuck Close: "People's faces are the road map of their lives."

Chuck Close, self portrait

(open source image)

(Article by Mark Krone published on the Boston University School of Visual Arts website, December, 2008)

Tonight, to a packed hall at Boston University, Chuck Close spoke of artists as performers, calling art the frozen evidence of a show the audience missed. Staged in the privacy of the artist's studio, distilled in a painting, the missed performance is what moves the public ever afterwards.

In an appearance billed as a conversation with close friend Robert Storr, dean of the Yale School of Art, Close traced his beginnings as an artist to face blindness, multiple learning disabilities, his grandmother, and the relative affordability of 1960s New York. It is rare for an artist to be so sure about the genesis of each and every part of his career but Close disclosed casually that he has been in therapy for over 35 years.

Early on, Close saw in his grandmother a kindred spirit (and perhaps she in him) whose anxiety forced her to search for activities to keep her hands busy. He recalled sitting on the sofa with her in the early 1950s, watching the McCarthy hearings (Sen. Joseph McCarthy's infamous Senate committee that accused people of being subversives with little or no evidence). As she knitted, he recognized that she grew calmer. The mental note was made: busy the hands and the chaos within lessons.

To help him to distinguish faces, Close began taking close-up head shots of friend's faces so that he could study them at home. "I needed to flatten the face out. I wanted to look at them to see if I saw what I thought I saw." Like a lot of learning disabled people, I was overwhelmed by the whole; I needed to break everything down into parts so that I could understand."

Like other painters of his generation, it was important to Close that his work not betray the influences of other artists. This attitude is in direct opposition to the appropriationism of today's artists. "You did this by purging your work of anything that might look like something others were doing. (Today) we are too much interested in problem solving. Far more interesting is to create problems that none of the current answers fit."

Aware that Andy Warhol was creating iconic portraits of the super famous, Close wanted to concentrate on unknown people. A friend, composer Phillip Glass, who worked as a plumber for Close, was an early subject as was painter Richard Serra. (They did not remain anonymous for long.) An admirer of Warhol ("I own two Marilyns"), Close pointed out that they differed in a number of ways, including in process. Where Warhol produced works "in one swipe of a squeegee," Close enjoyed the painstaking, cumulative process of creating an image from hundreds of smaller ones, thus his work is often one thing from afar and quite another close up.

"I wanted to make faces into a landscape. People's faces are the road map of their lives." Close shunned laughing or crying faces which reveal only one emotion. Intimate, close-up portraits of faces staring not so much at the viewer as at life, can reveal many journeys and emotions, sometimes contradictory but always springing from the decisions and happenstance that comprise a life. "A face staring out at you has many things to say."

The newness of an art form is difficult to capture in retrospect, especially if it has had the success of Close's work and become part of the lexicon. Close reminded the audience that in the early 1960s, a widely taught rule forbade painters to create a person's head larger than life-size. This occasionally resulted in bizarre renderings of huge bodies on broad canvasses with tiny heads dutifully shrunk to life-size. It was not the only conventional wisdom Close ignored.

"If you were dumb enough to be a painter, it was even worse to be a portrait painter. When critic Clement Greenberg, said that you could not do portraits at all, I knew I was going to have little competition."

Storr saved the audience from the tedium of two friends admiring each other in public by asking provoking questions, such as, "It has been said that quality in modern art is freshness. How do you maintain quality (freshness) by doing portraits of people's faces since 1962?" Close pointed out that photography allowed him to re-visit an image many times, "I recycle it. I see a new scale and vocabulary each time."

In reply to Storr's question about why Close has appeared so often in recent years at functions, fund raisers and talks in support of art and artists, Close pointed to his time in the hospital and subsequent paralysis. The idea of "the community of artists" became real as one artist after another visited him in the hospital, including Jasper Johns, Paul Cadmus, Bob Raushenburg and many others. Some were competitors over the years but all genuinely supported him during that time. "The community of artists is competitive, as it should be, but it is also incredibly supportive."

Dispelling the myth that artists are compelled by mysterious forces to create art whether it ever sees the light day or not, Close told the mostly student audience that at least half their efforts should be aimed at getting their work out to the public.

"I am not one of those artists who if stuck on a deserted island would cut a vein to use the blood for paint. If it is not going to be seen, I am not going to do it."

For the first time that evening, like one of his portraits, Close strained to face the audience head-on.

"I do it for you," he said.