Style ,
New York, New York. Detail at right of eye. This is a photorealistic painting representative of Close's earlier style, in contrast to his later "pictorial syntax" using "many small marks of paint". Laboriously constructed from a series of cyan, magenta, and yellow airbrushed layers that imitated
CMYK color printing, It took close to fourteen months to complete. ,
New York, New York. Detail at right of eye. Representative of his "later, more colorful and painterly style", "the elements of the picture are seen as separate abstract markings" when viewed close-up, while simultaneously maintaining the illusion of a realistic portrait at a distance. The pencil grid and thin undercoat of blue is visible beneath the splotchy "pixels." The painting's subject is fellow artist
Lucas Samaras. Throughout his career, Close expanded his contribution to
portraiture through the mastery of such varied drawing and painting techniques as ink, graphite, pastel, watercolor,
conté crayon, finger painting, and stamp-pad ink on paper; printmaking techniques, such as
mezzotint,
etching,
woodcuts, linocuts, and
silkscreens; as well as handmade paper collage,
Polaroid photographs,
daguerreotypes, and
Jacquard tapestries. His early airbrush techniques inspired the development of the
ink jet printer. Although commonly associated with photo realism and super-realism, Close rejected those terms on the basis that he was most interested in mark-making. He once joked to journalist Brandon Kosters that "the abstract expressionists like to talk about their work being figurative, and the figurative painters talk about being more abstract." Close had been known for his skillful brushwork as a graduate student at Yale University. There, he emulated
Willem de Kooning and seemed "destined to become a third-generation
abstract expressionist, although with a dash of Pop iconoclasm". As he explained in a 2009 interview with Cleveland, Ohio's
The Plain Dealer newspaper, he made a choice in 1967 to make art hard for himself and force a personal artistic breakthrough by abandoning the paintbrush. "I threw away my tools", Close said. "I chose to do things I had no facility with. The choice not to do something is in a funny way more positive than the choice to do something. If you impose a limit to not do something you've done before, it will push you to where you've never gone before." One photo of
Philip Glass was included in his resulting black-and-white series in 1969, redone with watercolors in 1977, again redone with stamp pad and fingerprints in 1978, and also done as gray handmade paper in 1982. Working from a gridded photograph, he built his images by applying one careful stroke after another in multi-colors or grayscale. He worked methodically, starting his loose but regular grid from the left hand corner of the canvas. His works are generally larger than life and highly focused. "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like
Richard Estes,
Denis Peterson,
Audrey Flack, and Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs. The everyday nature of the subject matter of the paintings likewise worked to secure the painting as a realist object." On the subject, Close said, "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." Although his later paintings differed in method from his earlier canvases, the preliminary process remained the same. To create his
grid work copies of photos, Close put a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copied cell by cell. Typically, each square within the grid is filled with roughly executed regions of color (usually consisting of painted rings on a contrasting background) which give the cell a perceived 'average' hue which makes sense from a distance. His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. His first picture with this method was
Big Self Portrait, a black and white enlargement of his face to a canvas, made in over four months in 1968, and acquired by the
Walker Art Center in 1969. He made seven more black and white portraits during this period. His later work branched into non-rectangular grids,
topographic map style regions of similar colors,
CMYK color grid work, and using larger grids to make the cell by cell nature of his work obvious even in small reproductions.
"The Event" On December 7, 1988, Close felt a strange pain in his chest. That day he was at a ceremony honoring local artists in New York City and was waiting to be called to the podium to present an award. Close delivered his speech and then made his way across the street to
Beth Israel Medical Center where he had a seizure which left him paralyzed from the neck down. The cause was diagnosed as a spinal artery collapse. He had also experienced neuromuscular problems as a child. Close called that day "The Event". For months, Close was in rehab strengthening his muscles with physical therapy; he soon had slight movement in his arms and could walk, yet only for a few steps. He relied on a wheelchair thereafter. Close spoke candidly about the effect disability had on his life and work in the book
Chronicles of Courage: Very Special Artists written by
Jean Kennedy Smith and
George Plimpton and published by
Random House. However, Close continued to paint with a brush strapped onto his wrist, creating large portraits in low-resolution grid squares created by an assistant. Viewed from afar, these squares appear as a single, unified image which attempt photo-reality, albeit in
pixelated form. Although the paralysis restricted his ability to paint as meticulously as before, Close had, in a sense, placed artificial restrictions upon his hyperrealist approach well before the injury. That is, he adopted materials and techniques that did not lend themselves well to achieving a photorealistic effect. Small bits of irregular paper or inked fingerprints were used as media to achieve astoundingly realistic and interesting results. Close proved able to create his desired effects even with the most difficult of materials to control. Close made a practice, during his final years, of portraying artists who are similarly invested in portraiture, like
Cecily Brown,
Kiki Smith,
Cindy Sherman, and
Zhang Huan.
Prints Close was a
printmaker throughout his career, with most of his prints published by
Pace Editions, New York. In 1995, curator
Colin Westerbeck used a grant from the
Lannan Foundation to bring Close together with Grant Romer, director of conservation at the
George Eastman House. In the daguerreotype photographs, the background defines the limit of the image plane as well as the outline of the subject, with the inky pitch-black setting off the light, reflective quality of the subject's face. In a 2014 interview with Terrie Sultan, Close said: "I've had two great collaborators in the God knows how many years I've been making prints. One was the late Joe Wilfer, who was called the 'prince of pulp' ... and now I'm working with
Don Farnsworth in Oakland at ...
Magnolia Editions: I do the watercolor prints with him, I do the tapestries with him. These are the most important collaborations of my life as an artist." Since 2012, Magnolia Editions has published an ongoing series of archival
watercolor prints by Close which use the artist's grid format and the precision afforded by contemporary digital printers to layer water-based pigment on
Hahnemuhle rag paper The watercolor prints are created using more than 10,000 of Close's hand-painted marks which were scanned into a computer and then digitally rearranged and layered by the artist using his signature grid. These works were called Close's first major foray into digital imagery, with the artist himself having said, "It's amazing how precise a computer can be working with light and color and water." A
New York Times review noted that the "exaggerated breakdown of the image, particularly when viewed at close range," that characterizes Close's work "is also apparent in ... [watercolor print] portraits of the artists
Cecily Brown,
Kiki Smith,
Cindy Sherman,
Kara Walker and
Zhang Huan."
Tapestries Close's wall-size tapestry portraits, in which each image is composed of thousands of combinations of woven colored thread, depict subjects including
Kate Moss,
Cindy Sherman,
Lorna Simpson,
Lucas Samaras,
Philip Glass,
Lou Reed,
Roy Lichtenstein, and Close himself. Although many are translated from black-and-white daguerreotypes, all of the tapestries use multiple colors of thread. No printing is involved in their creation; colors and values appear to the viewer based on combinations of more than 17,800 colored warp (vertical) and weft (horizontal) threads, in an echo of Close's typical grid format. Close's tapestry series began with a 2003 black-and-white portrait of Philip Glass. In August 2013 he debuted two color self-portraits at Guild Hall in
East Hampton, New York. In reviewing this exhibition, Marion Weiss wrote, "Close's Jacquard tapestries are not obviously fragmented, but are created by repeating multicolor warp and weft threads that are optically blended. Thus, portraits of Lou Reed and Roy Lichtenstein, for example, seem 'whole.' It's only when we get closer that we see the individual threads, which are woven together."
Commissions In 2010, Close was commissioned by
MTA Arts & Design to create twelve large mosaics, totaling more than , for the
86th Street subway station on the
New York City Subway's
Second Avenue Line in
Manhattan. ''
Vanity Fair's'' 20th Annual Hollywood edition in March 2014 featured a portfolio of 20
Polaroid portraits of movie stars shot by Close, including
Robert De Niro,
Scarlett Johansson,
Helen Mirren,
Julia Roberts, and
Oprah Winfrey. Close requested that his subjects be ready to be photographed without makeup or hair-styling and used a large-format 20 in × 24 in
Polaroid camera for the close-ups. A fragment of Close's portrait of singer-songwriter
Paul Simon was used as the cover art for his 2016 album
Stranger to Stranger. The right eye appears on the cover; the entire portrait is in the liner notes. Close donated an original print of his "Self Portrait" in 2002 to the
public library in Monroe, Washington, his hometown. ==Exhibitions==