On December 7th, 1988, as he prepared to honour a local artist at a ceremony in New York, Chuck Close felt a peculiar pain in his chest.
Though a medical centre stood just across the road, his passion for art meant there was no way Close was heading there until after he’d delivered his speech. When finally he did arrive at the Beth Israel Medical Centre, Close suffered a seizure which left him paralysed from the neck down.
The Event, as Close calls it, could have ended one of the most definitive artistic careers in American history, a career defined by fine attention to detail and a deft hand.
But Chuck Close was not going to let this be the end.
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Chuck Close was born in Monroe, Washington, on July 5, 1940. The family was poor, and through his early years, he suffered with several health issues, including dyslexia and prosopagnosia, a memory condition best known as face blindness that disables a sufferer’s ability to recognise even the most people they are most familiar with by their faces.
As such, Close was rather reserved, but found inspiration in his grandmother, a severe agoraphobe. “She loved to knit and crochet, and when she did, I saw a kind of peace came over her, and she was relaxed. I guess that must have made an impression on me,” he told The Telegraph.
He didn’t have to look far for an outlet. Due to his condition, art was the only subject in school that Close didn’t struggle in, and so he developed a passion for it. This passion was nurtured by his parents, both artists themselves.
Art lessons began at the age of eight, and life became stable, until his father died when Close was 11. That same year, his mother fell ill with breast cancer, and Close himself was bedridden with a terrible kidney infection.
When finally he could return to normality, Close did so with enthusiasm and wide-eye intentions. Though Close’s relationship with his mother would suffer in the wake of his father’s death, she was the first to take him to see paintings in the flesh. He recalls his first encounter with a Jackson Pollock painting at the Seattle Art Museum: “I went to the Seattle Art Museum with my mother for the first time when I was 14. I saw this Jackson Pollock drip painting with aluminium paint, tar, gravel and all that stuff. I was absolutely outraged, disturbed. It was so far removed from what I thought art was. However, within 2 or 3 days, I was dripping paint all over my old paintings. In a way I’ve been chasing that experience ever since.”
For over half a decade after leaving high school, Close attended a range of tertiary institutions. He spent two years at Everett Community College, before studying for his Bachelor of Arts at the University of Washington. In 1961, astoundingly, Close won a scholarship to the Yale Summer School of Music and Art, and eventually a position in a graduate degree program at the university, where he received a Masters in Fine Arts.
Here, his reputation began to grow. Renowned artist Philip Guston once came to his class to critique their work, and became so enamoured by Close’s talent that he delayed his flight home in order to visit Close’s studio. The two would remain close friends until Guston’s death in 1980.
Close’s expressionist style and skilful brushwork allowed him to secure a Fulbright grant, which he used to study at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, before returning to the US to teach at the University of Massachusetts, and eventually establish himself in New York in 1967.
It was a surprise when he abandoned his brushes and began to work with photographs that same year. At the time, prejudice against artists who did not work from ‘life’ was rife, but Close ignored such snobbish criticism in order to develop stunningly realistic portraiture. He would begin in the bottom left corner of his large canvas (some are up to 6-feet tall) and apply one delicate, considered stroke after another. Close refers to this process as ‘knitting’, perhaps a reference to his grandmother’s influence. The results were sometimes unflattering, but always spellbinding.
His most famous subjects would come to include composer Philip Glass, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Kate Moss, Brad Pitt, and Merce Cunningham, amongst others.
Two decades later, Close would come to realise that his fascination with portraiture could be directly linked with his face blindness, as he can associate faces with identities when they are depicted on a 2D plane like canvas. Whatever the case, by the early 1970s, his work was in nearly every major art museum, and he was being celebrated as one of the America’s great contemporary artists.
Around this same time, Close began print making. He moved his family to San Francisco, where he worked on a large mezzotint. In later years, he would travel to Japan in order to learn woodblock printing.
In 1988, ‘The Event’ left Close paralysed from the neck down as a result of a spinal artery collapse, in turn a result of the neuromuscular issues he had suffered as a child. He spent the next few months in rehabilitation, and managed to regain only slight movement in his arms.
Though he was confined to a wheelchair, it was not enough to stop him from continuing his art. Close straps a brush into a brush-holder on his right arm using his mouth, and then guides that hand with his left. A mechanical system adjusts the canvas up and down the wall to allow him access, while assistants mix the paint. Close makes every stroke himself.
The Event motivated a new style of work for Close. His assistant creates low-resolution grid squares on the canvas, which give a pseudo-realistic pixelated form to the work.
So too did he continue experimenting with other mediums, including tapestry, mosaics, watercolour prints, and digital imagery.
President Clinton awarded Close the National Medal of Arts in 2000, and was appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities by President Obama in 2010. He’s also received 20 honorary degrees and been named a full Academician by the National Academy of Design, but perhaps there’s no greater recognition of Close’s achievements than Philip Glass’s musical portrait of the artist, composed in 2005 as a 15 minute piano solo.
Outside of the art world, Close is an active philanthropist. He donated artwork for a New York Stem Cell Foundation auction, published five special editions of his President Obama photographs for sale in support of the Obama Victory Fund, backed the Coalition for the Homeless, and helped raise engagement in the arts in low-performance schools as part of the Turnaround Arts initiative.
Chuck Close’s story is one of perspective. He has not gone one day in life without suffering, and that suffering has only amplified through the years. That was never going to be enough to stop such a courageous, passionate artist. So when you face a day of doubt, consider Chuck Close, and let his accomplishments motivate you to strive on.