Chuck Close: Three Major WorksChuck Close: Three Major WorksI don’t really have a favorite artist, but the one artist that I have always had a little interest in is Chuck Close. He is truly a talented artist, whose remarkable career has extended beyond his completed works of art. Chuck Close started painting at the age of six and has never stopped. Growing up, Chuck had a learning disability, and in the 1940s, most educators didn’t know about LD’s or Dyslexia. Most student’s who had Chuck’s trouble reading, spelling, concentrating, or paying attention was often labeled slow or dumb. As a result, Chuck spent most of his childhood days alone, drawing. When most kids around his block wanted to be a policemen or firemen, Chuck wanted to be an artist. Art was the first thing he was ever good at, and it made him feel special because he possessed skills that other kids didn’t have. Chuck said , “Art saved my life” (Greenberg and Jordan). At age eleven, Chuck’s father died. His mother, who gave piano lessons at home, took a full-time sales job to support the family. At school Chuck’s learning disabilities made studying very difficult, but instead of giving up, he figured out a way to concentrate. “I filled the bathtub to the brim with hot water. A board across the bathtub held my book. I would shine a spotlight on it. The rest of the bathroom was dark. Sitting in the hot water, I would read each page of the book five times out loud so I could hear it. If I stayed up half the night in the tub till my skin was wrinkled as a raisin, I could learn it. The next morning I could spit back just enough information to get by on the test (Greenberg and Jordan). This discipline he had developed to get through school, now became the beginning of a detailed system that he used to organize his art.
Chuck said, “ Almost every decision I’ve had to make as an artist is an outcome of my particular learning disorders” (Green and Jordan).When he makes a big head or a nose, he breaks the images down into small units. He makes each decision into a bite-size decision. The system liberates and allows for intuition and eventually he has a painting. Three of Chuck’s major works, that I have grew to love are Fanny/Fingerprinting, Lucas II , and his self- portrait. These portraits are beautiful and filled with a lot of creativity.
The portrait entitled Fanny is one of my favorites. Chuck created this painting by pressing his wet fingers into an ink pad and then stamping them against a smooth surface. Chuck painted Fanny in his familiar hyperrealism way with every fold and wrinkle of her face visible, but instead of airbrush he built the image out of broken chunks of fingerprints. Chuck said, “I never intended to crank up the emotional content. I found that if you present something straightforward, a person’s face is a road map of his life” (Greenberg and Jordan). Fanny, Chuck’s wife grandmother ,was a person who had tremendous tragedy in her life. She was the only survivor from her whole family in World War two. But, even through her tragedy, she still remained an optimistic and lovely person. Both of these characteristics can be seen in her face, throughout the portrait ( Yau, John).
Another portrait I love is entitled Lucas II. Chuck experimented with thousands of vibrating dots of color. What I like about this painting is that, his eyes drills the viewer and the star burst colors sucks the viewer into a swirling vortex. In the painting, Chuck draws our eyes to a single point, the focal point, between the subject’s eyes by creating a target like pattern of concentric circles around it. The circles are intersected by broken lines of color that radiate from the center, causing a sense of simultaneous movement outward from the center point and back inward. Color contributes to the focal point of Lucas II in a very dramatic way. (Rathus, Lois Fichner) The painting is extraordinary, it makes Lucas look like a mad or crazy scientist. He reminds me of the scientist, in the novel, Frankenstein, who made Frankenstein and then abandon him. His hair resembles electricity, and
I will never forget the first two minutes: his head is a gigantic boneyard of flesh, covered in tentacles. As you can see, you are not going to understand what is happening in the movie at first, in light of real data, but after some thought to what the subject means through his eyes and in this painting, to what his human body is like. I mean, we now get to experience human bodies that look like a whole lot more like these animals we are making our characters believe, rather than their bodies. This is an unusual painting, but also one that brings a beautiful, deeply beautiful smile to a person. (Rathus, Lois Fichner) Lucas also showed you the kind of love he has with your daughter, the child he is sending to her; your own personal love. I still would recommend that if you are looking for a more graphic and realistic portrayal of the children Lucas has put into this work, and you want to see every inch, every bit of it, for yourself; a family like this one may be just how it was, it may not be for everyone. That said, I’ve loved this work too much to stay and get a refund for a bit. I’m very sorry if my review did not make it into tomorrow post. (Vaughn-Dunn) After watching the documentary on her, I know it was extremely difficult, as she said, to get through the films. It was about her having a baby boy and the idea became her vision, to be together with this child, because she never knew if that was her dream. I wanted the child of her father to take the first step and so that was pretty much my vision for her. I will tell you what I’ve noticed about them, this project is very real for me. These kids are much more beautiful. This is their first baby in years and they have been making the movies for years. They really seem to be the only humans they know. They all know things I’ve heard in the first six years of filmmaking. They may be old or even older but they feel it so close to family and friends they make friends immediately. And that’s not because they are like you. They’re just the most beautiful girls in the world and they are doing it for you, not us. (Jenny, Lois Fichner) You know the same thing happened to me when I first saw that film I love. I had just been on my trip with my best friend, our sister, to Paris. We went to go to school together and we were eating at a restaurant. So I’m sitting in the kitchen, watching a documentary on the French schoolgirls and they all say you know everything about them. So I know this picture of them looks so real to everyone. (Jenny, Lois Fichner) While doing this, I also read a book called “Gloria by Diana”, or rather, “The Life and Times of Diana Krieger”. And that’s my favorite because I said I love that story because you know when she was in a coma and then she fell asleep at the end, she felt herself and she realized Diana being in that way is very important. And I can also say, I was just getting tired, I needed to feel myself again. I read Gloria by Diana because I felt at a deeper level when I watched this movie. Diana and I were having a little chat, and we shared our stories in our stories, and I thought, Oh,