Chuck Close: Photorealist Artist

Chuck Close Imagine this. You walk onto a stage. There are lights, cameras, and the crowd cheering your name. You’re about to present an award as a world renowned artist. You take your first step onto that stage and then suddenly everything stops in time, and the crippling pain hits your chest in an instant. You make it through your eloquently prepared speech and rush to a hospital, where you suffer a seizure and collapse. You wake up paralyzed. You find out that you had a spinal stroke the night before and you are paralyzed from the neck down. It suddenly occurs to you that you will never be able to make art again. This was the tragic reality for painter and photographer, Chuck Close. This essay will discuss the life and art of this photorealist painter, and the miraculous transformation of his work after such a life changing event. Chuck Close was born in Monroe Washington on July fifth, 1940, to Leslie Durward Close and Mildred Wagner Close. As a dyslexic child, he looked to art. He, in his own way found his own ways of learning, and adapting despite his disability, and this can really be said about all aspects of his life. Close also has a condition, called prosopagnosia, otherwise known as “face blindness”. It is suggested in an interview conducted on PBS back in 2010 that the “face blindness” is what inspired Close to do portraiture. He made portraits of close friends and family members so he could more easily remember their faces, “so they can enter my memory bank in a different kind of way”, as he put it. Chuck Close is repeatedly compared to Andy Warhol because of his portraits, despite the fact that they are very different. Instead of painting celebrities, Close paints his loved

This could be seen a lot when you look at the subject’s hair in the portrait. One can see that Close portrays the light hitting a person’s hair in such a way that makes it look