Chuck Close spoke to a large crowd at Art Basel on Thursday Morning. The lecture was moitored by Richard Flood, cheif curator for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. For those of you who are not familiar with the story of Close, he was a successful painter and photography who had a disastrous spinal artery collapse in 1988. The doctors said he would never be a fully functioning artist again.
Over the hour that Chuck spoke, it became very clear that what he has not allowed refers to as "the Event" to destroy his life, though it strongly affects his work. He said confidently that "Art saved my life." Creating art is what keeps him moving forward. He said that "every aspect of my work "is totally determined by my disability." Chuck continues to paint, but in a totally different way than before his accident. He straps a brush to his hand (he refers to painting as "taking a stick with some hairs glued on the end, rubbing it in some colored dirt, and smearing it on a cloth"). He carefully copies photographs onto a gridded canvas, dot by dot, so that up close, his paintings appear pi elated, but from afar, they are unbelievably photorealistic.
Close spoke about moving beyond undergraduate & graduate work, and coming into one's own habits and freedom. "When your a good student, you make shapes that look like art...but it must look like some one else's art." In an effort to move into this freedom Close got rid of all his tools and all color, sticking to black paint only.
lastly, Close explained how his disability informs his work: he described himself as having a short attention span, not having a memory for the three dimmensional, but a nearly photographic memory for the two dimmensional. His work takes an enormous amount of dedication, to which he commented that "if you get an idea, you just have to be there long enough to resolve it."
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