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. 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 magna cum laude but from Yale as well.
Now, at the age of 57, he is one of the true superstars of art. 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. Many thought his career was over. I watched my muscles waste. 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 UW Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus, the highest honor an alumnus of the University of Washington can receive. 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 s. In the early s, he was exhibiting in prestigious international exhibitions. By , 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.
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. 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 s 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. 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. So he flipped 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.
His works depicted intense close-ups and details, every flaw on every patch of skin, mouth, nasal cavity. His famous 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.
She was attractive without being exceptional, naked rather than nude, complete with stretch marks, tan lines, and pores. He later moved into painting big heads, but his ideas began to change. On a December evening in , the then year-old Close was a guest of Mayor Ed Koch, who was hosting a dinner to honor achievements in the arts at the mayoral residence, Gracie Mansion. During the presentations, Close suddenly experienced back, chest, and arm pain. A policeman assisted him across the street to the emergency department at Doctors Hospital.
A recent biography describes what occurred:. His wife, Leslie, was waiting for an elevator in their apartment building when she heard the phone ring. He said he couldn't move—he couldn't feel anything. The nurses were kind of dismissing it, thinking it might be the result of whatever they had given him intravenously. By the end of that night he was paralyzed. By then, he was almost totally paralyzed from the shoulders down. He could barely move his head and neck; breathing was almost impossible because only the upper part of his lungs was working, the lower having filled with fluid.
After extensive tests, his seizure was diagnosed as the result of an occluded spinal artery. He was transferred to New York University Medical Center, where he spent a month in an intensive care unit because of poor pulmonary function, another month in critical care, and then 6 months at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. Close's quadriplegia is incomplete. Although he has no function of the lower extremities, he has enough strength in his arms and hands to paint without assistance.
He has a mechanism for raising and lowering his huge canvases from the floor beneath his studio. When he began to paint again in , he briefly used a wrist support. Atrophy is visible in his hand muscles and his handshake is weak. A convergence insufficiency exophoria was successfully treated with orthoptic therapy in He has a diopter vertical phoria, which is controlled with prisms.
The motility findings predate his quadriplegia. Close has an international reputation and he and his wife are well-known fixtures in the New York social and art scene. He is a strong-willed, determined individual who attempts to minimize the limitations placed on him by his disability. He is very generous with his time and energy and supports many charitable causes.
Close first exhibited a pixelated portrait in the fall of Just after that show opened, he was amazed to see the November issue of Scientific American at a newsstand, because the cover contained a pixelated, computer-generated color portrait of George Washington. The convergence of methodology astonished him. Evidently, computer scientists were experimenting with portraits in a manner very comparable with his own. The computer images were made of multiple small rectangles, and the colors could be manipulated just as his could.
The father of our country was depicted in low resolution, using pixels. Close did not work from computer-generated images then and still does not. Also in , a pixelated image of Abraham Lincoln was published on the cover of the journal Science , accompanying a paper by Harmon and Julesz. Harmon 5 reported that the minimum number of squares required to allow facial identification was Lincoln's face is so distinctive that he is recognizable from fewer pixels than is Washington.
In comparison, the 2. Viewers of Seurat's masterpiece A Sunday on la Grande Jatte at the Art Institute of Chicago have long been aware of seeing individual spots of color, which disappear when the viewer moves farther away from the canvas. Mosaics from Greek and Roman antiquity give similar effects.
If the observer moves closer to the image, he is well aware that it is made up of multiple elements. The individual pieces dominate and the figure disappears into a mass of geometric forms. One must step back or consciously unfocus the image to make it coherent and recognize that features such as the eyes and nose exist.
Close began with small pixelated forms, just a few millimeters wide, and has been steadily increasing their size, which can reach 10 cm. He has been enlarging the paintings as well as the pixels, though not necessarily proportionately. Pixel size is only meaningful relative to the size of the image and the viewing distance. The evolution in his style toward larger elements makes it harder to avoid the complex effects of his image fragmentation simply by moving farther away from the canvas.
Close's work has intrigued Denis Pelli, one of the inventors of the Pelli-Robson letter chart to measure contrast sensitivity. Pelli has been interested in identifying the critical size of the pictorial elements in Close's works necessary for the image to take on an overall structure rather than to appear as an abstraction. He found the threshold for distinguishing facial features is a visual angle of 0. If the visual angle of the separate elements is larger than this amount, the facial features are not recognized.
If the observer moves closer to the image, the visual angle is increased, and moving away does the opposite. This is a phenomenon of perception, not of optics. This critical size assumes the viewer has normal visual acuity. If the spectator normally wears glasses to improve distant vision and does not use his glasses to see the image, the individual elements become indistinct and the picture becomes recognizable as a face at a nearer viewing distance.
Close takes advantage of another aspect of visual perception: luminance brightness. The neurophysiologist Margaret Livingstone explains that colors that blend in some areas of his portraits are very similar in luminance. It is the dynamic tension between local and global patterns that is so interesting in Close's paintings, just as in the earlier Pointillist paintings. The Sydney Morning Herald , 12 December The Conversation , 10 December Grant, Daniel.
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