Chuck Close

© Chuck Close. Photo courtesy Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Chuck Close, "Keith/Mezzotint" (1972)

© Chuck Close. Photo courtesy Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Chuck Close, "Self-Portrait/Scribble/Etching Portfolio" (2000)

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Yes. You can look at my late works as reducing a human face to wallpaperin which case they are simply an armature on which to hang brushstrokesbut I also think there are other levels of meaning, some of which have more to do with the subject and some of which have more to do with paint.

When your work first came to public attention, you were often linked with the photorealist artists, something that you strongly objected to.

I didnt want to be linked with those painters. I dont feel I have much kinship with people painting motorcycles, really. It wasnt so much that I hated their workalthough in most cases I didI just wanted to be seen as an individual.

I dont think that I sprang from the same place that most of those people did. The things that influenced me, and the people that I went to school with, and the artists that I knew in the sixties when I was coming up, the common influence was that we were all trying to figure out how we could stop making abstract expressionist paintings which wed been trained to make in the academy. And the influences were Pop and Minimal and maybe Arte Povera and a few other [movements] like that.

The way Ive described it is thatwhether its Philip Glass, or Richard Serra or Brice Marden, all of whom were my friendswe all climbed out of the same primordial ooze at the same time. We were nurtured by the environment that we came out of, and then once we got on land we all went our separate ways.

Thats not an easy thing to write about or talk about because its not the same as work that is very similar on some superficial level which can be written about as a tendency or movement. It was a pluralist era and nobody likes pluralist eras. People like things simplified, and they like one high art thing going on so they can ignore the other stuff.

The situation youre describing is very like the situation today.

Were again in a pluralist era where nothing dominates and several different tendencies are going on at once. I think its really healthy for the art world, but frustrating for people who like easy answers and want to think about this as a particular kind of moment.