Interview with Chuck Close

It was love at first sight when I encountered a Chuck Close painting in New York museum back in the early 1990s. One of his oversized portraits made from little squares and lines of color that up close look like a quilt but as you move away blend together into a face. So the interview with Close on Art Info caught my eye in the news headlines. It discusses portraiture, self-portraits, and the fact that Close doesn't "paint people that I’m not close to". Close says he aims for "a very neutral expression. If you have an extreme expression -- either laughing or crying or whatever -- then that’s the only content that you will get out of it. Whereas if it’s presented neutrally and flat-footedly, you can read whatever evidence is embedded in their visage, like laugh-lines and furrows or whatever, in the same way that you can make assumptions about people when you meet them at a cocktail party." Read interview with Chuck Close...