#Chuck close portraits series#

Composed via a highly illusionistic computer-aided method of industrial weaving, these wall-size tapestries are formed by thousands of combinations of woven colored thread. However, the methodical composition process remains always the same.įrom 2003, Close’s accumulative artistic process finds application in the art of modern tapestry. Later work has branched into non-rectangular grids, topographic map style regions of similar colors, CMYK color grid work, and using larger grids to make the cell by cell nature of his work obvious even in small reproductions.

The artist’s first picture with this method was Big Self Portrait, a black and white enlargement of his face to a 107.5 by 83.5 inches (273 cm × 212 cm) canvas, made in over four months in 1968.

His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. Typically, each square within the grid is filled with roughly executed regions of color (usually consisting of painted rings on a contrasting background) which give the cell a perceived average hue which makes sense only from a distance. To achieve that, he puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell.

#Chuck close portraits series#

To create his artworks, Close first disassembles one of his photograph into a series of pixels. Transferring and recostructing a HD photographic image to canvas, Close suggests that the “whole” is always the sum of its parts (even when these parts are concealed). His portraits are created with a methodical system based on photography’s underlying processes. “I’m pre-pixel. Chuck Close emerged from the 1970s painting movement of Photorealism, also known as Super-Realism but then he moved well beyond its initially hyper-attentive rendering of a given subject to analyze new aspects of the construction of images.