Chuck Close Observational Free-Write - Emma

Emma

When I look at the painting of “Emma” by Chuck Close, I see a grid made up of diamond-shaped sections, very small sections, a diagonal grid - not a vertical grid; the squares are made up of tons of different colors that are indistinct when viewed up close but when the painting is viewed from far away all of the colors blend together and form a coherent and descriptive painting. The background, and especially the skin, is made up of colors that I would not necessarily imagine putting together. The entire painting is made up of diamonds that are filled with many many different layers of paints of different colors that when viewed from afar blend together to create the proper hue. The skin itself seems to be made primarily out of varying hues of red, orange, yellow, purple, green, peach, and other skin tones. There does not seem to be any brown used in the painting except in very small amounts and in shaded areas. The eyes themselves are made up of primarily blue, teal, and aqua colors but also include purples and pinks in order to provide contrast and to neutralize the blue tones. In order to create specific curvatures that are not easily apparent using the angular grid method, I see parts of the painting that contain many-layered ovals or banana-shaped sections. Up on the baby’s forehead, there appears to be parts that resemble an amoeba. I also see sparingly scattered across the background regions of color that resemble either boomerangs or capital L’s. In order to create white areas such as the whites of the baby’s eyes or the white stripes on the baby’s shirt, combinations of extremely light tints of varying hues are employed in the same concentric ring style used in the rest of the painting. My art teacher tells me that I’m not supposed to use pure black in any painting except for the pupils of the eyes but this baby seems to have black not only in the pupils of the eyes but also in various parts of the hair. The pupils of the eyes are the only object in the entire painting aside from the various oval and banana-shaped sections that are not strictly locked into the pre-set grid. These pupils are the only part of the entire painting that are perfectly circular all in themselves without any kind of grid around them. One of these pupils are located instead of a diamond box but the other is located at the nexus between four different diamonds. The highlights of the baby’s face are created from grid boxes that are filled with primarily layers of yellow tints, while the shadows on the baby’s face are created by primarily using tints of violet. This is interesting because violet and yellow are complimentary colors and the combined nature of the colors should cancel each other out and create a neutral tone such as grey or brown. Mid tones on the baby’s face are created using primarily green and orange, which is interesting because green and orange are more or less analogous to yellow on the color wheel and are both equidistant from both violet and yellow on the color wheel. Another thing that I noticed is that again, my art teacher told me to never use pure white in a composition or art piece while I am in her class but Chuck Close utilized a pure white hue, or at least one that registers as pure white to my eyes, in the whites of the baby’s eyes and the baby’s shirt. There are also small dots of what appears to be pure white in the baby’s eyes which serve as sources of reflected light. From far away the baby’s eyebrows are apparent but when viewed from up close they are almost indiscernible. By viewing the composition far away and marking the position of the eyebrows I have been able to deduce that they are formed from combining primarily hues of orange and violet, and that when viewed up close they seem to blend into the myriad of chaotic colors that fill up the grid. My analysis of the color composition of the portrait also leads me to observe that there is a general lack of shades of green, opposed to the many other colors used in the portrait. Although there is an abundance of red, blue, violet, and orange shades, the only location that I am able to see shades of green is in the upper left hand corner of the background and the darkest shadows under the baby’s chin on the viewer’s left side. Aside from that, the only other uses of green are in very light tints. These tints are almost pastel-colored, and seem to float towards the green-green-blue section of the color wheel. They are almost what some people would call “seafoam green”. I find it extremely interesting that within each gridded diamond or shape contained within this portrait, there is no less than three different rings of color that blend together to form a single hue when viewed from far away. From what I can observe, no single diamond-shaped region has any less than three different hues in it either. There does not appear to be any diamond that contains two or less layers of color, nor can I spot any regions that contain any less than three entirely different colors. It is my personal observation that there is often multiple tints or shades of the same hue within a single region, but they are never the exact same hue. Upon closer observation, I have found that there are regions on the face of the baby that have the exact same hue as their outermost layer of color, leading me to believe that the artist Chuck Close initially painted large solid regions of the same hue before going over these areas again with the concentric rings of different hues, shades, and tints.