Chuck Close: Portraits in Mosaic

Hi Tsar ((S))

I justed to tell you that I watched the most amazing programme about Chuck Close this week - it was actually one of the Imagine series - I was so stunned which told the stories through Oliver Sacks experiences

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Sacks

Incredible stories.

I found myself drawn into the abstract art of Chuck Close on such a level I couldn't really even begin to explain it

the thing being it's not the big picture, it's the little pictures that make up the big picture, the small little things, often abstract, seen progressing the creation...



Man & His Life

The remarkable career of artist Chuck Close extends beyond his completed works of art. More than just a painter, photographer, and printmaker, Close is a builder who, in his words, builds "painting experiences for the viewer." Highly renowned as a painter, Close is also a master printmaker, who has, over the course of more than 30 years, pushed the boundaries of traditional printmaking in remarkable ways.

Almost all of Close’s work is based on the use of a grid as an underlying basis for the representation of an image. This simple but surprisingly versatile structure provides the means for "a creative process that could be interrupted repeatedly without…damaging the final product, in which the segmented structure was never intended to be disguised." It is important to note that none of Close's images are created digitally or photo-mechanically. While it is tempting to read his gridded details as digital integers, all his work is made the old-fashioned way—by hand.

Close’s paintings are labor intensive and time consuming, and his prints are more so. While a painting can occupy Close for many months, it is not unusual for one print to take upward of two years to complete. Close has complete respect for, and trust in, the technical processes—and the collaboration with master printers—essential to the creation of his prints. The creative process is as important to Close as the finished product. "Process and collaboration" are two words that are essential to any conversation about Close’s prints.

The Timeline and Photo Gallery within this section provide further detail and examples of the remarkable life, talents, and artistic accomplishments of Chuck Close, and how his willingness to explore many different ways and means has allowed him to create astonishing works of art.






Can you imagine seeing or feeling the world like this?

It's extraordinary.

In such a teeny way, not like he does, but I do imagine that - I see small... not big, pieces making a whole. It's not what my eye sees, it's what my mind pieces together creating the peace I yearn for.

I don't know if your can see this in the US, but if you can, it's well worth a watch

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012b42j


Presenter Alan Yentob meets clinical neurologist and author Dr Oliver Sacks to investigate the myriad ways we experience the visual world and the strange things that can happen when our mind fails to understand what our eyes see. In the course of this investigation, Yentob tells the life story of Dr Oliver Sacks, the man who would become one of the world's most famous scientists.

Alan delves into this world by going to meet several of the case studies from Sacks latest book, The Mind's Eye.

He meets Stereo Sue, neurobiologist Sue Barry, who always saw the world as a flat 2D image until she suddenly acquired stereoscopic 3D vision in her late forties; Canadian crime writer Howard Engel, the man who forgot how to read, who remarkably continues to write despite a stroke that destroyed his reading ability; Chuck Close, the renowned portrait artist, who cannot recognise or remember faces and Danny Delcambre, an extraordinary and spirited man who, although having a condition which means he was born deaf and is gradually going blind, lives life to the full and uses close-up photography to record the world around him.

Often overlapping with these case studies is Sacks' own story. Here, doctor and patient combine as he talks about his childhood, his own struggle with face blindness, and the loss he felt when eye cancer recently destroyed his 3D vision.

People with such beautiful spirits.

So incredibly humbling. Simply amazing individuals. An hour of enlightenment. I had to rewind and rewatch. Stunning.

Imagine.

I've read about Chuck Closes's problem with facial recognition - so interesting, both for him and for his works of art. Brilliant guy.

A thousand thank yous Izzie. I'm sure Netflix if it doesn't have it now will bring to their streaming library sometime soon. They carry a lot BBC programs. Plus the NYPL has a great cache of art documentaries as well. So whoever gets a copy first will be where I get this intriguing documentary from.

Thanks for this thread, tsar.
Fascinating, seeing what he's gotten up to more recently.
My recollections of his work are mostly his huge photo-realist portraits, like this self portrait from way back.:

Quite a jump to this:

... though you can clearly see the connection.

I'll read that interview now & do a bit of catching up.
Thanks.

never was a Close fan. Hes more an illustrator than a fineartist. I can understand his popularity but unlike many large scale portratitists like Sargent or Pyle or Eakins, very few of his works convey anything other than detailed representations done by opaque projections onto a canvas or board.