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April 10, 2006
Not just another pretty face
Before the collapse, [Chuck Close] was big, burly and blunt. Now his 6-foot-plus frame has folded into a wheelchair, but there is added buoyancy to his spirit, coming from having faced a near-death experience and rebounded. His work was on a successful trajectory before the paralysis. But even with extreme limitation of movement, Close was able to pick up and move on with almost no discernible difference in the quality or quantity of his output. He has said in the past that not painting was never an option; that if he had to, he would spit the paint on the canvas.
...Close does not rely on a traditional painterly style of portraiture. He divides his canvas into a grid, giving each square an initial color that will have little or nothing to do with the final colors. Then he begins painting in the upper left hand corner, moving from left to right, top to bottom, chewing off a row at a time, like a mechanical typewriter. A mechanism installed in his New York City studio moves the large canvases up through a slot in the floor as he finishes each row so he is always eye-level with the row to be painted. Working each square one at a time is like painting thousands of individual abstract paintings, and he feels slightly celebratory, he says, when each is finished.
Posted by Michelle at April 10, 2006 04:17 PM