1948) featured in 2008 at the Tacoma Art Museum - which served to continue the artist's vision of the portrait as an expressive subject both on the individual level and through a growing body of his work. Notable as well are several collaborations with others - such as a series of portraits paired with poems by Bob Holman (b. His subjects ranged from friends and acquaintances to fellow artists, poets, performers, actors, and musicians. In the decades that followed Big Self-Portrait, Chuck Close continued to paint both self-portraits (31 according to the Artifex Press catalogue raisonné) and portraits of many others, even following a debilitating stroke in 1988 that left him partially paralyzed. One tube of black paint alone was used to produce seven more portrait paintings.Ĭlose explained this was a conscious choice he made in 1967, and that he was convinced that doing so would help propel him in a new and positive direction as an artist: "If you impose a limit to not do something you've done before, it will push you to where you've never gone before" (Norman). The process was one of conservation and reduction, where paint was thinned down, scraped, erased, and reapplied sparingly. Not only was Big Self-Portrait a milestone for Chuck Close in its adoption of the portrait as a consistent, principal theme in his work, but it was also significant as the first artwork he achieved using a new approach to painting technique, with non-traditional tools, such as an airbrush, a razor blade, and an eraser on a power drill. but changing the medium, the method of mark-making, and the scale transforms the experience of that image into something new" ("Tacoma Art Museum Presents. 1925), an early advocate of Close who was director of the Walker from 1961 until 1990, recalled that "the price was right" and that it remained a point of friendly rivalry between the two men over the years (Friedman, 11).Ĭlose offered a new way of looking at portraits through this approach, noting "people think that if you have a photographic image, there is pretty much only one thing you can do with it, that because of its iconography, it is fixed. In 1969, painting was purchased by the Walker Art Center at a cost of $1,300 for its permanent collection. The first such painting, Big Self-Portrait, stands nearly nine feet tall and shows the artist's head and shoulders rendered in minute detail: a cigarette jutting from the right corner of the mouth, the musculature of the neck where it meets the bare shoulders, the hair framing the face in a tangle. He took a series of black-and-white photographs, then used a grid placed over one of these images to paint, grid section by grid section, the image on an enlarged scale. While influenced by the Abstract Expressionist movement underway during the years of his formal education as a painter in the early 1960s, Close began experimenting in 1967 with a new approach to combining abstraction and realism. Close studied art at Everett Junior College and then the University of Washington, from which he graduated in 1962, before moving on to further study at Yale University and then in Vienna. The painting is both the first self-portrait of the artist's career (many will follow) and his first artwork sold to an arts institution.īorn in Monroe, Snohomish County, Chuck Close grew up in Everett and Tacoma, where he practiced drawing and painting from a young age. This first public display of Big Self-Portrait comes not long after the work's purchase by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The exhibition, which runs through May 12, 1970, features the work of artists Neil Jenney (b. The huge self-portrait, a painted enlargement of a close-up photo of the artist's face, is part of an exhibition titled Three Young Americans that opens that day at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio. On April 17, 1970, American painter Charles "Chuck" Close (1940-2021) exhibits his breakthrough painting Big Self-Portrait (1967-1968) publicly for the first time.
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