Chuck Close

Chuck Close was a celebrated American painter, photographer, and printmaker born in1940 in Monroe, Washington. Growing up, Close struggled with severe learning challenges and face blindness, an inability to recognize faces in everyday life. Turning to art as his way of making sense of the world, he studied at the University of Washington and Yale University, where he became close friends with future icons like Richard Serra and Brice Marden, before settling into New York City's SoHo scene in 1967.

While most of his peers were focused on pure abstraction, Close chose to paint real people: his family and fellow artists like Philip Glass, Cindy Sherman, and Alex Katz. Working from large Polaroid photographs, he laid a grid over each image and built the portrait one tiny square at a time. His earliest black-and-white canvases were so lifelike they helped launch the Photorealist movement, while his later paintings and prints loosened into bursts of rich color, thumbprints, etched lines, and handmade paper pulp. Up close, every square is its own miniature abstract painting; a few steps back, the whole face comes into focus.

Close treated printmaking not as a side project, but as a creative laboratory, spending months at a time with master printers to push the limits of etching, woodcut, and screenprinting. In 1988, a sudden spinal artery collapse left him paralyzed from the neck down. Refusing to slow down, Close regained movement in his arms, strapped a brush to his wrist, and entered the boldest, most colorful chapter of his career.

Close died in 2021 at the age of 81. Today, his work is beloved for its warmth and inventiveness of how we view subject matter, cementing his place as one of the most important American artists of the modern era.