Several items I found interesting from Life, Christopher Finch's biography of Chuck Close.
The artist Chuck Close early on had a clear idea that he wanted HUGE success as an artist. He wanted to have his paintings seen by MILLIONS of PEOPLE. His work had to be in Public Museums .
That meant in his 1950's he had to be in the right place to get an art education. Yale was a great follow-up to the quite amazing JC he first studied art at in Washington. He moved to New York City. At this time the Art Community was small and the major museum for contemporary artists -New York's Museum of Modern Art-was collecting artists just a few years older that Chuck Close.
He was a figurative artist. Abstract Expressionism was king of the hill still. Learning to paint in the stroke of A.E.'s most figurative Willem DeKoonings, he went for his own identity. The whole figure seemed to have hot spots. Portraits. A 'mug-shot'.
the genius of Chuck Close is that his portraits are paintings not of the 3-D subject itself but of a 2-D photograph translated from the subject. And he painted how the photograph was composed and convinced into being the subject now.
The cool thing is he used the method of process that he observed from his grandmother. She worked for hours knitting small squares of material and then spent more hours knitting all these pieces into a bigger something useful. From then on Chuck Close was about PROCESS, no matter what medium he was creating in.
In his life he had continual struggles with health issues -- later even suddenly paralyzed from the neck down. Slowed him down but didn't stop him painting. It was just a little more complicated process. but it was still a process.
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