Chuck Close

Chuck Close was born on July 5, 1940, in Monroe, Washington. Suffering from severe dyslexia, Close did poorly in school but found solace in making art. After earning his MFA from Yale in 1964, Close took his place atop the American art world by creating large-scale, photo-realist portraits that have creatively blurred the distinction between photography and painting. Close deepened his love for painting and art in general. At the age of 14, he saw an exhibition of Jackson Pollack paintings. Pollack's style and flair had a great impact on Close, and, as he later recounted, it made him determined to become an artist. The art movement he uses is Superrealism.

Chuck close begins his painting by firstly dividing his photograph which is going to paint from into a grid, he then creates a corresponding grid on the canvas. Then he transcribes the image onto the canvas square by square, proceeding from the top left to the bottom right. He then starts to paint each square. All of Chuck Closes work have been done by hand.

In my opinion i like/dislike his art work because in a way i like the way he uses bold colours on top of each other and always makes the circles on top of each square stand out, also the way he still manages to keep the facial features easy to spot. On the other hand i dislike his art work because when we had to do a task based on his art work i found it tricky due to the amount of colours we had to use and the style of his work which i find challenging. Whilst looking at the colour wheel i identified the primary colours, the complimentry colours( opposite a primary colour eg: yellow-purple, red-green, blue-orange) the spilt complimentry colours ( two colours that make up the complimentry colour so opposite red is green and two colours to each other will be blue and yellow. I used some parts of the colour wheel but didnt pay much attention to it.

Graphics Evaluation

Graphics Evaluation

 

In this project our theme was ‘street style’ meaning everyday clothes; we investigated different types of street style clothing from blogs and used drawing techniques such as outline, not taking the pencil of the paper, continuous line to copy a image. We then created a mood board of our everyday clothes such as shoes, jumpers, tops, jeans etc this was in a way to show the types of clothes/shoes I wear. Our next task was to choose four blogs; within them blogs we had to choose four images

We then had to choose four different set of images from Chictopia we had a choice on what images we wanted to choose but it had to have a category such as dresses, jeans, trainers etc. After we had to trace or draw the images straight in to our book these would be our thumbnail sketches. We then had to use a set of images that we chose and pick one image from there and do different technique samples such as ink, watercolour, colour pencils etc. This then helped me to choose which technique I liked the most; which was the colour pencils. I choose this technique in particular because I like the way the artist Agnes Decourchelle uses this art material in her work to show people it isn’t a dull/boring material to use. I really like the way she expresses the use of colour pencils like the direction of the way she colours/ the way she can also blends the colours.

After choosing to use colour pencils I then measured 13cm across and 18cm down I did this 3 times, this is where I traced my images on to from the tracing paper. I did have a problem well using colouring pencils due to the fact I wasn’t feeling well so my concentration wasn’t 100%. This then affected how my work looked in the end. If I were to change anything I would have either used colour pencils/watercolours or watercolours only because watercolours the colours are strong which will make the image look much brighter in a way.  Also the layout of the images I would have putted the two best ones I liked first.