This afternoon was lecture by Chuck Close who is exhibiting his prints at Miami Art Museum. A show of prints is certainly easier to mount than paintings, especially with insurance values for a travelling show, but this is something he envisioned many years ago. Most of the time once an edition has been run the master plates get destroyed but, Close kept all of his because the process of making art has always been important to him. He said he only paints about three paintings per year now. They are very labor intensive and he needs his assistants to assist him throughout the process. He takes his own photos using a 20 x 24 polaroid camera.
Because he’s in a wheelchair after his spinal blood clot, his studio has a slot built into the floor that allows his paintings to be rotated and, raised and lowered into the floor so that the position where he paints remains the same, only the painting moves. This is because he grids the photos he works from and transfers the information to his canvas. Obviously, it is not the same as drawing a straight line, for instance, but a series of tonalities that then represents what we identify as a line.
His quest was to create a work in which every square inch was equal in value to every other square inch. He’s worked over thirty years at it so, we assume he’s reached a level of perfection that transcends the process. If you took a digital image and look at each pixel you’d see something like his paintings are constructed although, he began this search before computer images were seen by most except some computer geeks.
Anyway, you can see I’m thinking about art tonight…