Chuck Close

Charles Thomas Close, known as Chuck Close, was an American painter and photographer born in Monroe, Washington, in 1940 and who died in Oceanside in 2021. He is one of the best-known figures of photorealism and hyperrealism, and his monumental portraits, based on photographs, became a landmark of contemporary American painting.

He studied at the University of Washington in Seattle, graduating in 1962, and earned his MFA at Yale University in 1964. On a Fulbright grant he spent time in Europe, and afterwards he taught art at the University of Massachusetts. His work was shown at the Whitney Biennial in 1969, and in 1973 it was exhibited for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

His method involved overlaying a grid on both the photograph and the canvas and copying cell by cell. His early tools included an airbrush, rags, razor blades and an eraser mounted on a power drill. Big Self Portrait, from 1968, measures 107.5 by 83.5 inches and was the first work he made this way, followed by seven more black-and-white portraits. Close often returned to the same images: a photo of Philip Glass was redone in watercolor, with stamp pad and fingerprints, and on handmade gray paper. Later he introduced non-rectangular grids, topographic-style areas of similar color and CMYK grids.

In 1988 he suffered a spinal artery collapse on the day he was due to speak at an art awards ceremony. He was left paralyzed and kept painting with a brush strapped to his wrist or held in his teeth, producing portraits built from grid squares prepared by an assistant. Kiki, completed in 1993, took him four months.

Close rejected the labels photorealist and hyperrealist, saying he was most interested in mark-making. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received the National Medal of Arts. His legacy lies in bringing painted portraiture to an unusual scale and precision, and his airbrush techniques, according to sources, helped inspire the development of the inkjet printer.