(1940–2021)
U.S. painter and photographer
Chuck Close
I’m the least mystical person on the face of the earth.
“Chuck Close,” interviewed by Lisa Yuskavage, BOMB magazine, Issue 52, Summer 1995.
If you look at Seurat, most of the dots in the grass are green, the generic color of that area. The other colors only modify that color. I feel less kinship to Seurat than I do to Byzantine mosaics, where an image is built out of discreet incremental marks—chunks of stone or glass—that fit together. I want people to see what made the image. I like dropping crumbs along the trail like Hansel and Gretel. That’s what all these paintings are about.
“Chuck Close,” interviewed by Lisa Yuskavage, BOMB magazine, Issue 52, Summer 1995.
I think of my work as what used to be called women’s work: knitting, quilting. Women were busy cooking, raising children, so they had to have an activity that they could pick up and put down. A quilt may take a year, but if you just keep doing it, you get a quilt. Or if you knit one and pearl two, and you believe in the process, eventually you’ll make a sweater. There’s some aspect of that in me.
“Chuck Close,” interviewed by Lisa Yuskavage, BOMB magazine, Issue 52, Summer 1995.