Chuck Close by Kate Jurek

Chuck Close gave insight to his personal life through his personal art pieces. Most of Close’s early works were life portraits based on pictures of people who had influenced him throughout his life and career, primarily other artist and close relatives. After attending school at Washington University in Seattle and grad school at Yale University, Close become an art professor for University of Massachusetts. He was well known for his realistic style that made paint look like film despite his prosopagnosia which is a condition in which it is hard for a person to distinguish people by their face. This condition influenced his art style in which he created a grid work copy of a photograph, filling each square with colorful rings that, form a distance, appeared to be skin colored. His paintings were larger than life showed detail.  His first full one-man show was in 1970 and within the next three years his work was display at New York Museum of Modern Art.