Chuck Close: The Photorealistic Window to His Mind

Chuck Close is a contemporary artist who has become globally famous for being a master of the photorealistic style of painting. His full name is Charles Thomas Close, and he was born on July 5th, 1940 in Monroe, Washington. Throughout his childhood, he struggled with learning disabilities which caused him great hardship in the classroom environment. Additionally he has been described as being a clumsy and un-athletic child, and possessed no affinity towards playing sports. His personal struggle with dyslexia coerced him into the artistic environment, and he began displaying various types of artistic expression from a young age. At the tender age of four years old, Close declared that he wanted to become an artist. When he turned five years old, his father built for him an easel, and gave him his first set of oil paints. In order to make friends and “get kids to be around [him]” (Marmor) when he was a child, Close drew and painted. The magnitude of his artistic skills soon became extremely apparent.

When he was eleven years old, his home life was devastated by a barrage of tragedies that directly affected both him and his family members. The first of these tragedies was the passing away of his father, who had constantly been in ill health throughout Close’s childhood. Soon after, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. This led to a foreclosure on their house due to their inability to afford the medical bills, and forced them to move. Soon after, his grandmother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, and Close himself was bedridden for a large amount of time because he had contracted nephritis; a severe kidney infection. In order to cope with the unbearable anguish, Close looked towards his artistic talents for security and release.

These artistic abilities continued to develop and manifest throughout his secondary school education, and in 1958 Chuck Close enrolled in the University of Washington, Seattle. Over the next four years, Close studied art and graduated in 1962 with a B.A. degree. He then continued to attend grad school at Yale University from 1962 until 1964, where he earned his M.F.A..

After graduating from grad school, Chuck Close taught art for three years at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, until he decided that he would leave this teaching job in order to pursue his own personal art career in 1967.

Severe tragedy struck again in Close’s life on December 7th, 1988, when he was forty-nine years old. He suffered from a spinal blood clot that left him quadriplegic and confined to a wheelchair. When asked about his primary concern during this dark moment in his life, Close is quoted to have declared that he was afraid “since [he’ll] never be able to move again, [he] would not be able to make art. [He] watched [his] muscles waste. [His] hands didn’t work.” (Close) Thankfully since then, Close has indeed been able to continue his artistic career with the use of various technological aids to compensate for his lack of mobility. He currently utilizes a brush-holding device which is strapped to his wrist and forearm to make up for his inability to grip the brush physically, and the enormous canvases that he works on are set up on hydraulic lifts in order to be moved around. Although he is confined to a wheelchair and unable to stand, the canvases themselves are rotated, lifted, and lowered so that he may reach any part of them.

During his life, Chuck Close has revolutionized the artistic genre of portraiture. Originally starting out a practitioner of more expressionistic paintings, he decided to break away from that style in order to “find [his] own voice,” (Close) and began creating enormous portraits in the photorealistic style of painting. His success with this new photorealistic style of painting stemmed from two distinct psychological forces- his difficulty retaining memories of what people’s faces looked like and Obsessive-Compulsive tendencies that arose as a direct result of his chaotic and tragic childhood. After suffering from the spinal blood clot that left him quadriplegic, he was no longer able to physically work using the photorealistic style of painting, and because of this his personal style of painting shifted towards a more abstract and minimalist style. This registers as a noticeable and fascinating change in the structure of his paintings, as well as a change in the palette of colors he chooses to employ. These post-hospital paintings could be described as surreal or almost bizarre, and like their predecessors they contain key psychological clues that point towards Close’s subconscious scrambling to regain control of its external environment. Because of Chuck Close’s intricate and complicated personal psychology combined with his creative and artistic abilities, he has undoubtedly revolutionized portraiture and become one of the world’s most famous contemporary artists.

Perhaps one of Chuck Close’s most famous paintings is his self portrait entitled Big Self-Portrait, which was completed in 1968. This monstrous piece of artwork was completed in his signature photorealistic style on 107.5 X 83.5 X 2 inch canvas. It was created using a mixture of black acrylic paint and water, and applied using an airbrush. Final details were created by carefully scratching off layers of the paint with a razor blade. This painting is so incredibly detailed, that at first glance it appears to be nothing but an enormous photograph. The painting features a young, shirtless Chuck Close with thick black-rimmed glasses standing in front of a plain white background. He is displayed only from just below the shoulders up, with his head tilted slightly back and facing directly towards the viewer. His hair is long and unkempt, and spidery lengths of chest hair protrude upwards towards his face from the bottom of the canvas. He sports a rather thick mustache, and in his mouth he holds a smoldering cigarette. His gaze is distant and unfocused, and his two front teeth are just barely visible from behind slightly pursed lips. The overall countenance of the portrait gives off a distinctively edgy aura.

While the overall portrait itself is not exceedingly creative at first glance, what captivates viewers the most is the sheer amount of detail that Close put into this piece of work. When viewed from afar, it appears to be a legitimate photograph taken with a high-quality camera. Only when viewed from close-range can the painting even be recognized as such.

Keeping in mind Close’s lack of control over intellectual information and three-dimensional memory due to his Dyslexia, it makes sense that Close would compensate for these disabilities by exerting obsessive control over his artistic media. This psychological control complex undoubtedly developed out of feelings of inadequacy that were created by his childhood problems with Dyslexia, as his focus shifted away from things that he could not control (his learning abilities or memory) towards things that he knew he could, such as his artwork. In this way his desire to exert control over his environment amplified his pre-existing artistic ability, and gave him a sense of security. To this day, he claims that “inspiration is highly overrated,” (Close) favoring artistic development through personal experience and hard work.

It must not be ignored, however, that there is sufficient evidence to propose a more sinister source to his spectacularly detailed painting style. During interviews, Close has admitted that each and every “tone is the result of a conscious effort,” (Close) creating artworks that embody a “level of perfection that is only [his].” (Close) Putting artistic pride aside, he seems to display an obsessive fascination with perfection. Claiming that “most of the pleasure [in painting] is in getting the last little piece perfect,” (Close) Chuck Close could be the perfect embodiment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, disguised as almost superhuman artistic ability. Interestingly, Close may demonstrate a self-induced, and subconsciously controlled, psychological disorder used to compensate for another disabling psychological disorder, and to cope with the traumatic events that plagued him during his eleventh year of life.

At a young age, Close’s battle with Dyslexia combined with the barrage of multiple, uncontrollable tragedies during a relatively short time span in his childhood may have planted in his subconscious a burning desire to regain control over his environment. This could potentially manifest itself as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder later in his life. When his three-dimensional memory began to fail him later on in his life (possibly an extension of his childhood Dyslexia) and he was having difficulty remembering the faces of individuals, it can be theorized that his subconscious would recall this sense of helplessness from his childhood and urge him to correct it. Therefore when he created portraits of individuals close to him in order to remember them, he would not only be moved by the desire to remember the faces of these people but he would be obsessively urged to control the media in which he worked by his subconscious, and in doing so be able to obsessively, and metaphorically, control them and keep them close to his heart and life- something that he was unable to accomplish with his father, the health of his mother or his grandmother, a secure, dependable home to live in, or his own health. Due to his chaotic childhood, it wouldn’t be hard to grasp that Chuck Close developed OCD which categorized him in the form of an “arranger;” (Helpguide.com) someone who is “obsessed with order.” (Helpguide.com)

If the theory of Chuck Close having a form of Obsessive-Compulsive disorder is to be taken seriously, there must be present both obsessive patterns of thought and compulsive behaviors that coincide with these thoughts. Fortunately for the point of this paper, there is such evidence. If Chuck Close were to be plagued by obsessive and reoccurring desires to control his environment due to childhood trauma, and this were triggered particularly by the creative and artistic processes in his brain, it makes perfect sense that this would manifest as an “excessive need to do things perfectly” (Cushman) in regards to his paintings. Additionally, the disorder would go largely unnoticed and completely undiagnosed if it were to only manifest in the art studio, catalyzed by the artistic processes in Close’s mind.

When Close suffered from a crippling spinal blood clot on December 7th, 1988, he was left quadriplegic and confined to a wheelchair. Now, in addition to being unable to control his mind fully, he lost nearly all control of his physical body. His fine motor skills were obliterated, requiring the use of a mechanical device strapped to his forearm in order to even hold a paintbrush. In order to reach every part of the enormous canvases that he was used to working on, he required them to be set up on hydraulic lifts by other people, and rotated and moved around frequently. Understandably he would no longer be physically capable of continuing the incredibly detailed photorealistic work that he had been so accustomed to producing, and this would be another crippling blow to his psyche in regards to its desire to control his environment.

In a haunting rendition of his own face, Chuck Close’s 2003 Self-Portrait reflects the psyche of a man whose subconscious mind is scrambling to regain control of a life that has suddenly left its comfort (and control) zone. At close range, the painting appears to be nothing more than a mass of incoherent squares and blobs of white, black, values of gray and ashen blue. The forms seem to flow and writhe, ever-elusive and ungraspable like water. When the painting is viewed at a distance, however, Close’s mastery of hue is displayed as the “random” forms unify into a stunning portrait of an aged Chuck Close, eyes transfixed intensely on an unknown object behind the viewer. Close’s ghastly pale countenance seems to almost float in front of a dark background, with the contrasting colors and “restless abstract shapes” (Friedman) accentuating the spectral feel of the piece. In this and similar pieces, Close strove to utilize a “creative process that could be interrupted repeatedly without . . . damaging the final product, in which the segmented structure was never intended to be disguised.” (Close) This painting, like much of his post-blood clot paintings, displays an underlying but distinctive grid-like structure that both divines and unifies the painting. Coincidentally, or perhaps not-so-coincidentally, the same could be said about his spinal blood clot. The “curiously liberating” (Close) experience, although certainly traumatic, seems to have “absolutely accelerated what was already happening,” (Friedman) in the sense that it further unlocked and amplified Close’s creative abilities. His spinal blood clot forcibly loosened his iron grip of control on his life. Post-hospital, Close’s paintings seem to be “much more than objective exercises in technique,” (Friedman) as they give invaluable insight into the psychological battles being waged deep in his subconscious.

Following the theory that constant childhood struggle and tragedy caused Chuck Close to develop OCD, it would be easy to suggest that a similar response would be triggered by his spinal blood clot and subsequent loss of use of his arms and legs. Due to his physical inability to utilize such a tight photorealistic painting style, he would hypothetically need to find some other aspect of painting that he could exact obsessive control over in order to satisfy the urges emerging from his subconscious. He was virtually forced to adopt the “grid-and-blob” style that did not require the same amount of fine motor control, as it allowed him to paint in bold monochromatic shapes that did not need to be created using minute, accurate movements of his hand. It is apparent in his post-hospital artwork that the object of his obsessive control became the very hue he used in order to create these pieces of artwork. In order for the individual shapes of color to have the proper hue and effect when viewed from afar, Chuck Close needed to produce layers upon layers of paint that took the form of concentric rings, squares, and other shapes when viewed at close range. By combining multiple rings of different colors and shapes, he created the perfect hue and amount of detail needed for the observing eye to read the desired form.

These Obsessive-Compulsive tendencies are strikingly apparent in his 1997 Self-Portrait, whose forms are made not from mixtures of black, white, and blue, but instead in full-blown color. Even the so-called “whites” of the eyes are “actually composed of many hues: blues, pinks, ochres, almost everything but pure white.” (Friedman) Close examination of the “skin tone” used on this painting reveals concentric rings of various tints and shades of reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, and violets. His facial hair contains dark browns, light blues, and even aqua colors. The highlights on his face including the ridge of his eyebrows and his cheekbones contain a distinctly larger concentration of golden or light-yellow colored shapes, while the lowlights and shadows on his face and neck are formed primarily out of concentric rings of forest green, brown, and shades of red. “Solid” figures such as the rims of his glasses and the outer edge of his face and head are fragmented by and integrated into the hues and figures that are behind them. The whites of close’s eyes are formed by alternating concentric rings of pink and blue tints, with a relatively small amount of white.

Although not a self-portrait, the 2002 portrait of his niece Emma displays an even greater advancement in this new artistic style. Although it is based off of a diagonal grid, the painting contains significantly large sections that do not fit into the diagonal grid, but are also made up of layers upon layers of different colors that blend together and form a coherent and descriptive painting when viewed from far away. In order to create specific curvatures that are not easily apparent using the angular grid method, Close painted specific regions of the painting using multi-layered ovals or banana-shaped sections. Additionally, on the baby’s forehead there are strange shapes that resemble amoebas and regions of color that resemble either boomerangs or capital L’s can be seen sparingly scattered across the background.

The background of the painting and the skin of the face are made up of multitudes of unusual colors that one would not expect to see on a person’s face. The skin, in particular, is made up primarily out of varying hues of red, orange, yellow, purple, green, and peach. 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. Interestingly, because violet and yellow are complimentary colors and the combined nature of these hues produce a dark and neutral tone. Mid tones on the baby’s face are created using primarily green and orange, which are (more or less) analogous to yellow on the color wheel, and are equidistant from both violet and yellow in comparison to each other. From far away, the baby’s eyebrows are apparent but when viewed from up close they are almost indiscernible. They are formed from combining primarily hues of orange and violet, and when viewed up close they seem to blend and dissipate into the myriad of chaotic colors that fill up the grid, making discernment of their form impossible. There does not seem to be any brown used in the painting except in very small amounts in shaded areas, as opposed to his 1997 Self-Portrait in which the skin contains a significant amount of brown. 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 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, but never pure white, are employed in the same concentric ring style used in the rest of the painting. The only amount of pure white noticeable in the painting is in the form of small, circular dots baby’s eyes, which serve as sources of reflected light. Pure black can be found only in the pupils of the eyes and in various parts of the hair.

Analysis of the color composition of the portrait exposes a general omission of shades of green. Although there is an abundance of red, blue, violet, yellow, and orange shades, the only location that shades of green may be found 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. Interestingly, 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. No single diamond-shaped region has any less than three entirely different hues in it, either. There are often multiple tints or shades of the same hue within a single region, but they are never the exact same hue.

Viewed chronologically, Close’s Emma serves as a stylistic bridge between his 1997 and his 2007 self-portraits. It contains an even larger usage of unusual and exotic colors than in his 1997 self-portrait, and contains a proportionately larger underlying grid structure. The larger grid structure has allowed Close to create portraits that have been increasingly abstract, and with a larger numbers of layers or rings per subdivision. The larger grid structure can also be seen in his 2007 Self-Portrait, in which the fluidity of the painted image and number of un-gridded abstract shapes has also increased. It seems only logical to predict that in the future Close will continue to employ a progressively larger grid structure in his paintings, as well as utilize a larger number of colors per division in order to create even more abstract and interesting pieces. It might even be speculated that in the future, the general public should be expecting Chuck Close to produce artwork in which the image is not based on a grid at all, but on conglomerations of completely abstract shapes. It should also be expected of Close that he will continue to paint portraits of himself and others around him, as dictated by his psychological needs.

Close’s habit of using only “the purest intensity”(Close) and “the purest saturation” (Close) in these paintings and others such as these satiates his subconscious desire for order by exacting complete control over the hue that he uses in order to compensate for his inability to create perfect form. This is further exemplified by noting the range of colors Close chose to use in the creation of such pieces. He admits to using only “a very simple palette of red, yellow, and blue” (Guare) in order to “build [his] own colors.” (Close) By rejecting the use of anything but the primary colors, Close demonstrates not only mastery of color-mixing techniques and color theory but his psychological desire for control, as he chooses to restrict himself from using pre-made colors in order to build them himself. These incredibly captivating and revolutionary works of art stand as a testament to the powerful release offered by creative and artistic endeavors, and she sheer creative power of the human mind.

Close’s “psychological qualities inherent in his self-portraits” (Friedman) have become increasingly apparent in his post-hospital years. When viewed with a keen eye, these “painting experiences” (Close) contain such multitudes of information that it makes it almost impossible to not “conjecture that some form of self-revelation is taking place” (Friedman) within Close’s mind. Close has admitted that when painting self-portraits, he “always referred to it as ‘him’” (Close) and that he found it exceedingly difficult to “deal with the fact that [the person being painted] was [him.]” (Close) This statement holds great weight, especially when it is applied to a comparison between his older self-portrait, the 1968 Big Self-Portrait, and his more recent 2003 Self-Portrait. The older self-portrait, depicting a crystal-clear image of an unkempt, almost sneering man clashes greatly with the indistinct and fluid shapes that form the spectral image of a post-hospital Chuck Close. This new style suggests an almost desperate attempt to regain control, as the grid-like structure of the painting tries, and fails, to contain the flows and ellipses of color that make up the ghostly visage. Close may be suggesting, through this haunting rendition of himself and others like it, that he is not ready to admit that he has once again lost control over yet another keystone aspect of his life.

As a psychological case study, Close is an extremely interesting individual whose artwork seems to be fed and driven by the interaction between various psychological influences. He was both “pushed” towards art by his inability to excel at intellectual endeavors due to Dyslexia, and “pulled” towards it as a way for him to gain security through love, friendship, and desire for attachment as a child. Once the seeds of creative expression were planted in his psyche, they were greatly amplified by his Obsessive-Compulsive tendencies that were a direct result of previously having little to no control over his life, and the lives of those he loved around him. His OCD manifested itself through the only psychological outlet Close possessed - his artwork - and thus allowed him to create fantastically detailed portraits of those whom he held dear. Attachment again comes into play, as the monumental likenesses of these individuals served as a way for Close to forcibly ingrain the faces of those he wanted to remember into his mind, which up until this point had been almost impossible due to an unknown psychological issue inhibiting his retention of three-dimensional memory (presumably an extension of his Dyslexia, although this is not a scientifically recognized symptom of Dyslexia). In an effort to overcome this limitation, it appears as if Chuck Close subconsciously called upon the Obsessive-Compulsive urges for order and control generated by his chaotic childhood in an effort to understand the structure of his subject’s faces down to the minutest detail. When he was again subjected to influences out of his control in the form of a crippling spinal blood clot, Close re-revolutionized portraiture by again channeling his OCD through his creativity. Although his body was no longer able to perform the precise movements needed to continue his stunning photorealistic portraits, he compromised by inventing a new painting style- one that relies on strict control of hue instead of on shape, and in the process of doing so revolutionized portraiture and became one of the forefathers of the photorealistic movement in the United States.