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.