John
1971-72
acrylic on gessoed canvas
100 x 90 in. (254 x 228.6 cm)
Chuck Close is an artist known for such huge portraits in photorealistic style. Regarding his techniques, as he is working with a variety of drawing and painterly techniques, like printmaking, tapestry, and photography, in this painting John, he also refers to photography to make the painting. The hyper-realistic element is important to him so he uses mechanical elements to move the image to the canvas although working only using his sight ‘to achieve the intensely animate detail, sectioning off the reference photographs into grids and transferring each piece by hand onto his monumentally sized canvases’ (theBroad).
The painting present the face of an old man in glasses, it is painted exactly the way it should look on the photograph, some elements, like the frame of the glasses sharp as under focus, and the others, unfocused, like John’s hair and shoulders. Nevertheless, the color and lighting is even on the whole figure.
The interesting thing about such large-scale portraits of Chuck Close is the fact that they are so big it is hard to make every little detail sharp and clear-cut, so when the viewer approaches the painting too close all the smoothness of artist’s hand is visible, the way it couldn’t be visible on the photograph. For example, the beard of the man from the portrait, there is no point to argue that it is realistic or even photorealistic, but as eveness of all the face hair is visible it does not look like stiff and harsh beard of an old man as if there is not enough focus on the beard. On the contrary, his eyes and skin are very carefully depicted, as if every wrinkle is so deep it is possible to feel it touching the canvas.
In general, such photo-reality and extremely high attention to the details makes the viewer focus more on the techniques and finding some defects or flaws in artist’s work to see and prove it is made by hand, not by another printer, this makes the onlooker forget about the man portrayed, about the look of his eyes and the corners of his mouth directed slightly down, the wrinkles pulled to the ground with the weight of time or experience of John as a person. Moreover, Chuck Close often chooses his friends or relatives to be the subject of his work, so the painting is definitely personal.
Chuck Close works with airbrush and a grid to enlarge the painting to such a enormous size, critics argue that in the process ‘Close showed the limitations of the photograph through his intuitive adaptation and changing of the image to accommodate the demands of painterly detail and scale’ (theBroad). The first impression from the size of the canvas is that the importance of the face painted should be corresponding to it. However, after a couple of moment in the gallery with the bunch of such painting the onlooker practically forgets about the face or personality portrayed but gets absorbed in all the small insignificant details, every hair and wrangle or highlight on the glasses catches attention.
All in all, seeing such exposition makes the viewer think about the life of these people, what their look or face impression is trying to say to the person on the order side or look at the painting the other way around, seeing all the specifics and technicalities thinking about the way painter’s hand moved to create such weird and captivating painted photographs.
Works cited
"Chuck Close | The Broad". Thebroad.org. N.p., 2016. Web. 30 Apr. 2016.
http://www.thebroad.org/art/chuck-close
"John | The Broad". Thebroad.org. N.p., 2016. Web. 30 Apr. 2016.
http://www.thebroad.org/art/chuck-close/john
