Chuck Close On Why He Paints the Face.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: APRIL 14, 1998
Time: 12:00
Tran: 041401np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Chuck Close
Sect: News; Domestic
Time: 12:06

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Our faces reveal so much about who we are. That's part of what makes Chuck Close's paintings so fascinating. They offer you the chance to stare at larger-than-life, hyper-realist renderings of faces -- faces that become transformed into what Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes describes as "moonscapes of pores, wrinkles, blackheads, and stubble."

Close has been painting faces since the '60s. It's amazing that he can paint at all now. Nearly 10 years ago, a stroke left him paralyzed from the neck down. After a partial recovery, he's been able to paint from his wheelchair.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York is showing a retrospective of Close's work. I asked Chuck Close why the face has been his subject for so long.

CHUCK CLOSE, ARTIST: Well, initially I started making portraits, or at that time I didn't even call them "portraits," I called them "heads," because it was as different as possible from what I had been doing before. My work had been abstract and I was looking for something that was diametrically opposed to what I had done as a student.

And so, the first heads were just my friends, and I had no idea then, 30 years ago, that I would still be painting heads today. And in fact, I'm sure I wouldn't have believed it if someone had predicted it. But over the years, I -- I found that of all the kinds of subject matter that I could use, nothing interests me as much as people. And it offers the viewer an entrance into the work through life experience, because we all look in mirrors and look at each other and look at images in magazines and film.

And -- and it's a great leveler, whether a person is the most sophisticated person in the art world or a lay person, we all share that knowledge of and interest in the way people look. And then hopefully, once somebody gets into the painting, maybe through that -- the entrance of their life experience, they'll notice some other things that are going on in the paintings and become involved in that as well.

GROSS: The technical aspect and the aesthetic aspect?

CLOSE: Yeah, I mean I think the work is -- although they're considered realistic -- I think I'm as interested in artificiality as I am in reality. And I'm very interested in making paintings. And I want them to hang on the wall with what I think are the better paintings being made today, and not just other portrait paintings. And that, I'm interested in people looking at the distribution of marks and colors on a flat surface, that is the -- the painting aspect of the work as well as the image.

And in fact I think today, they're really almost split down the middle -- half of the time you see the marks, the strokes, the distribution of paint and these funny little shapes that occur and -- lozenge shapes and donut shapes -- and then it warps into the image. And then after you look at the image for a minute, they seem to rip back to the flat reading of the surface of the painting again.

GROSS: Let's try to describe what's happening formally in your paintings. Your paintings are built not of, like big elaborate brush strokes, but of little dots or little circles. And it's the accumulation of all these dots or circles or squiggles, depending on the period that we're looking up -- looking at -- that kind of together add up to the larger structure of a face.

But all the components are just really small dots or squiggles or bits of color.

CLOSE: Yeah, there's no -- there's no direct relationship between the photograph that I work from, and the imagery that's embedded in that photograph, and the marks that occur on the canvas. It's a little bit like translating from one language to the next. If you were to translate it directly, it might not make any sense. You sort of have to understand it in one language and then deconstruct it and reconstruct it in the new format.

And of course, paintings don't happen the same way a photograph happens. Photographs -- paintings are built, in my opinion, are built incrementally, one unit at a time, in a way that's not all that different from, say, the way a writer would work. That is, there's never any time that a writer is doing anything more than slamming one word up against the next, and rejecting one word and slipping another one in and seeing how that works.

And because I work incrementally, I do the same thing. I push little pieces of paint up against each other and I work essentially from the top down, from left to right. And I build -- I slowly build these -- these paintings -- construct them the way somebody might make a quilt or a crochet or knit.

GROSS: I want to talk a little bit more about the faces themselves -- the way you paint the faces themselves. You've said that you try to see the faces neutrally, without opinion or subjectivity -- without editorializing in any way about the face. And yet, the face always reads in some way to me. I see the faces very subjectively, even though you as the painter didn't see them subjectively.

Talk with me about the approach that you're taking for the subject matter -- of not kind of imposing any kind of feeling or point of view.

CLOSE: Well, it's not that I'm uninterested in the psychological reading of the paintings. I just don't want to lobby for one reading over all others, and to present them straightforwardly and flat-footedly without editorial comment; without cranking it up for -- for extra psychological readings or without drawing big circles around things, saying: "make sure you see it this way."

I sort of leave it to the viewer to -- you know, to read the image. And I -- I believe that a person's face is a kind of roadmap to their life. And embedded in the imagery is a great deal of evidence, if you want to decode it -- for a person who's laughed his or her whole life, they'll have laugh lines; if they frown their whole lives, they have furrows in their brow.

And it's not necessary for me to have them laughing or crying or anything in order to have people be able to read them.

GROSS: Your canvases are very large, and because you include every detail of a person's face -- every line and wrinkle and pucker and pore, every flaw is included, or what we'd consider a flaw is not only included, but it's kind of enlarged because the painting is so large. And that's part of what I find so fascinating -- the faces are so real and recognizable.

Looking at one of your faces in a painting, it's a lot like looking at yourself in the bathroom mirror, with the kind of harsh lighting that you have there. And you see everything. So there's something so recognizable about the landscape of the faces -- the way you paint them.

CLOSE: Well, yeah. I -- we don't stand close enough to each other. We don't invade each other's space enough to really be able to see the intimate level of detail that I typically put in one of these paintings, because they're in fact usually nine-feet high.

So if -- if there's more information than you ever really wanted to know about someone, and it makes it perhaps a more intimate experience. I make these -- try to make these big, aggressive, confrontational images that you can see from clear across the room. And you have one kind of relationship with it there and then another relationship at a middle-viewing distance, where you scan it and you -- you can't readily see the thing as a whole. And then hopefully, I've sucked the viewer right up to the canvas, where you can see the individual marks and the methodology -- how it got there.

But in a way, what I've tried to do is make something -- rip it loose from the context in which we normally see it and make a kind of Brobdignalian (ph) world, whereas the viewer behaves almost like one of Gulliver's Lilliputians crawling across the landscape of the face -- not even necessarily always being aware of what it is that they're crawling across, stumbling across -- stumbling in a beard hair and falling into the nostril.

It makes it for a very active and very personal, physical experience for the viewer, I think.

GROSS: What kind of reactions do you get from people whose portraits you've done, when they see their own faces blown up like that?

CLOSE: Well, everyone I've painted has had some kind of trouble dealing with it, and I would like to thank my sitters for their act of generosity -- their extreme generosity -- in lending me their image without knowing what I'm going to do with it, and without any control over how I will use it.

They have to put vanity aside and these are not commissioned portraits, so they have no -- they have no -- I give them no right to really lobby for me improving the way they look, although I don't try to be particularly -- I don't try to be any more ruthless with them than I am with myself.

But it is difficult to deal with, and some people have changed the way they look immediately after I painted them. They'll shave their mustache off or they'll get a haircut or they'll grow a beard or something. One -- only one person really anticipated this, and that was my friend the painter Joe Zucker (ph), who -- who came essentially in disguise and he -- he realized that all he had to do was present me with evidence that someone like that existed; wasn't necessarily him. And he ended up looking like -- as a Midwest used car salesman for 1/100th of a second.

LAUGHTER

And he never had any trouble. He went home and he washed the Brylcreme out of his hair and it wasn't him. But most people had to deal with it after I've painted them and -- but everyone has had, I think, some kind of trouble. If your nose is bent a quarter of an inch in real life, you can ignore it. But when a painting is nine feet high, it'll be bent six inches and it's very hard to convince yourself that it's not happening.

GROSS: My guest is painter Chuck Close. The Museum of Modern Art in New York is showing a retrospective of his work. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

If you're just joining us, my guest is Chuck Close, and there's a retrospective of his paintings at the Museum of Modern Art.

You know, we think of classical painters as having wanted to paint models who were beautiful. But it's not, you know, classic beauty that interests you -- your faces.

CLOSE: Well, I -- I, you know, I'm not -- I'm not looking for the grotesque or the -- or the ugly.

GROSS: I think you're looking for the fact of the face.

CLOSE: Well, I'm looking for every man, every woman. I first painted my friends, usually other artists, because they were anonymous and I didn't want -- you know, Warhol was painting superstars and movie stars. And the history and traditions of portraiture have often been the wealthy, the famous, Popes, presidents.

And I wanted regular people that we didn't know. Unfortunately, or fortunately for them, many of them managed to get famous on me. And they became much more recognizable, at least within the art community. And now, I don't worry that much about trying to find anonymous people. And so many of my friends have become well-known, I just paint them as they come.

GROSS: I read that you've had a learning disability that's affected your ability to actually recognize faces in real life.

CLOSE: You know, I think -- I think I was probably driven to do what I do because I do have a great deal of difficulty recognizing faces. I -- I have almost photographic vision for things that are two-dimensional, which is probably why I work from photographs instead of working from life. But I -- I believe I was driven to painting the portrait, at least partially, by a desire to commit to memory and to really understand and scan the images of people that I care about because I do have this trouble recognizing faces.

And of course, I don't remember their names either. So...

LAUGHTER

... I'm in big trouble.

GROSS: So, one of the reasons why you paint from photographs is because you recognize faces better in two-dimensions than in three, so it's easier for you to use a picture than a model. Are there other reasons why you work from photographs for your paintings?

CLOSE: Yeah, when you paint from life for an extended period of time, and my paintings have taken as long as 12 or 14 months, and routinely now take three or four months each. If you work from life, the subject gains weight and loses weight. The hair gets long and they cut it off and they -- they're happy; they're sad; they're awake; they're asleep.

And the painting becomes a kind of mean average of all the changes that the model went through, plus whatever feelings you have for them while they're occupying your space. I would hate to have a subject in my studio for a year.

So, the paint -- the photograph gives me an opportunity to have a poem-like frozen moment of time; sort of cuts across time -- 1/100th of a second. And there's something of the freshness and the immediacy of that 1/100th of a second is still there hopefully in the finished painting, which I construct over a more novelistic time frame and -- and it allows me to just keep working and to always refer back to the original photograph to see whether I actually saw what I thought I saw.

And I often then recycle that photograph and make many more images, and each -- it's really wonderful. Every time I go back to the photograph, because I've changed scale, tools, methodology, working method -- whatever -- I find totally new information within the photograph that I didn't notice the first time.

GROSS: Tell us a little about the way you work with grids when you're painting a face from a photograph.

CLOSE: Well, grids, you know, besides being one of the great modernist conventions, the grid has been around most recently, because it's a flattening device. It's a way to, you know, to re-state the flatness of the canvas.

But in fact, the use of the grid as a scaling-up method goes back to ancient Egypt and was, of course, used in the Renaissance and used all along as a way to take a small drawing or a preparatory sketch and enlarge it by having smaller squares on the preparatory sketch and bigger ones on the painting.

It's just a way to scale-up an image. But at a -- and all of my work, from the 1960s on, have been built with the use of a grid. I don't use a projector or anything like that to get an image on. But at a certain point, I decided to let the grid remain a visible part of the image. Initially, I would get rid of the grid so nobody knew that I used it, but at a certain point, I began to leave the incremental unit to show, and I found all kinds of ways, from using my own fingerprints to gluing on little wads of pulp paper to any one of a number of ways of working incrementally, and letting the -- the individual unit show.

One of the things I like about working that way is that there's nothing about the building block which says anything about what's going to be made from it.

GROSS: Exactly. Right. Exactly.

CLOSE: There's -- there's no mark that equals hair. There's no mark that equals skin or anything else. It's a little bit like an architect choosing a brick. The brick doesn't determine anything about what kind of building will be built from it. You stack up the bricks one way and you make a gas station; or you stack up the bricks another way and you can build a cathedral. Both of them will be very different experiences, but it wasn't the brick that determined the nature of that experience.

GROSS: So, what suits your personality about working in these smaller units -- one dot at a time or one grid at a time?

CLOSE: Well you know, actually I -- I'm a nervous wreck...

LAUGHTER

I'm a slob. I'm -- I have no patience. And I'm rather lazy -- all of those things would seem to guarantee that I would not make work like I make. But I felt I didn't want to just go with my nature and say: "well, that's who I am. I can only make big sloppy nervous quick paintings." I thought to construct a situation in which I couldn't behave that way was also to address my nature.

But I found that one of the nice things about working this way -- working incrementally is that I don't have to reinvent the wheel every single day. Today, I did what I did yesterday and tomorrow I'll do what I do today. You can pick it up and put it down. I don't have to wait for inspiration. There are no good days or bad days.

And I'm -- every day essentially builds positively on what I did the day before. In some ways, I think it's rather like what used to be called "women's" work -- that is, quilting, crocheting, knitting or whatever. And the advantage of that way of working was that women could knit for a while, put it down, go feed the baby, come back and pick it up and knit a little more, and then put it down and go out and weed the garden.

And it -- it was -- it allowed for a way to just keep working. If a belief in a process, for instance: how do you make a sweater? Oh, my God, I wouldn't know how to make a sweater. But if you -- if you believe in the process and you knit one and you purl two long enough, eventually you get a sweater. And I think given my nature, it was very good for me to have a way to work in which I was able to add to what I already had and slowly construct the final image out of these little building blocks.

GROSS: How have you dealt with impatience, though? Don't you ever feel like, OK, it's going to take me another 12 months of these dots to have a painting. I want to see it now.

CLOSE: Well, you know that's -- I -- I do finish each area as I go, so I have a chance to see what it's going to look like almost from the beginning.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

CLOSE: But -- but you know, patience is -- is a funny thing. I used to work every day and make a painting every day. And now, I work every day and I make a painting every several months. But work is work, and it doesn't seem to take any more patience to keep working on one piece than it did to make a different piece every day.

And the big difference is that I used to enjoy painting. I loved the activity, but I didn't care very much about what I made. And now, I -- I -- I have a way of working which, like I say, is essentially a positive building on what I already have. And eventually, I get to something about which I care a great deal more.

So for me, that was a very productive trade-off.

GROSS: Chuck Close -- the Museum of Modern Art in New York is showing a retrospective of his work. He'll be back in the second half of the show and we'll talk about the stroke that left him largely paralyzed.

I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Back with painter Chuck Close. Since the '60s, his subject has been the human face. His larger-than-life paintings of faces are collected in a retrospective at the Museum of Art in New York -- Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In the first half of the show, we talked about his paintings. Now, we're going to hear about a medical condition that transformed his life and nearly ended his career.

It was I think 10 years ago that you had a terrible medical problem. I think it was a blood vessel in your spinal cord that -- that -- what? -- that broke? And...

CLOSE: Well, actually it's very funny that -- I don't know if your listening audience knows that you're in Philadelphia and I'm in New York. And I'm staring at a microphone instead of staring at you.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

CLOSE: But it is -- it was nine years ago that I was in this very studio talking to Susan Stamberg about the National Endowment for the Arts, which was the last thing I did before I went up to Gracie Mansion where I in fact became -- suffered this collapsed spinal artery -- and became within in a matter of a few minutes a quadriplegic.

So it's a little freaky to be in this studio, and I'm sort of wondering about what's going to happen today when I leave. But at any rate, yes, I did have this event in my life in which I ultimately became a -- what's called an incomplete quadriplegic. And I was initially paralyzed from the shoulders down, but I got -- I got considerable return.

And I don't have the -- I am confined to a wheelchair and I don't have the use of my hands. And I paint now with brushes strapped to a brace, which is strapped to my arm. But essentially, I'm not doing anything that I don't think I would have been doing anyway. I think the work has progressed much the same way that it would have.

And luckily, I had something to get back to that really mattered to me. If I hadn't already known how to paint, I don't think I could have learned to do it post-injury. But once you know how to do something, it's not so hard to equip yourself for what's necessary to be able to get back to it.

GROSS: What's amazing is if you were the kind of painter who did canvases with big virtuoso brush strokes, you would have never been able to keep up with that, once you lost your movement. But because you work in these small kind of dots or circles or squiggles, and use those as building blocks, you're still, with that paint brush strapped to your hand, able to do more or less the same style of painting that you did before.

CLOSE: Right. I -- I was lucky that the way I was working was ideally suited for -- for the condition I found myself in. The one thing that I haven't been able to do, and it does bring me considerable upset, is that because I don't -- my fingers don't move, I haven't found a way to really draw, because drawing requires much more the wrist and the movement of the fingers for a kind of nuanced kind of control.

But painting, you really do with your whole arm anyhow, and you move with your shoulder and your elbow more than you do your wrist and fingers.

GROSS: How do you think your style or your vision has changed in the nine years that you've been paralyzed?

CLOSE: Well, I don't think there's been much change at all. The one -- the one area in which there might be some change is that I think there -- because I have so many more eggs in this basket, there are so many things that I can't do that I used to enjoy doing. Luckily, painting is -- if I had to pick one thing that I could still do, it certainly would be painting and luckily that I can do.

But I guess there is a slightly increased sense of celebration in the work -- a more celebratory aspect to it because I am so pleased to be able to still work and I've -- I enjoy the activity so much. And in fact, the days and hours that I paint fly by and the times that I'm doing other things move at glacial speed. And those times drag on.

GROSS: Because you don't have much movement now at all and you have to paint with the brushes strapped onto your wrist, have you given a lot of thought to how much painting is something that happens in your mind and how much is something that happens with your hands?

CLOSE: Well, somebody told me in the hospital -- and I don't remember who it is -- that "oh, you'll be all right because you paint with your head and not with your hands." And I thought: "oh, easy for you to say" -- you know.

LAUGHTER

I thought -- gee, this is like something that came out of a fortune cookie or something. I was actually quite -- quite annoyed that they had this -- this kind of throwaway answer for my very severe problem. But in fact, you know, they were right. Once you know what art looks like, you can figure out how to make some of it. And it's just a question of adaptation.

I would like to say also that -- that part of my ability to get back to work is largely due to the fact that I -- I am and have been for 30 years a very successful artist, and have made a lot of money, and I can afford to equip myself with what's necessary to be able to get back to work. I can have a totally wheelchair-accessible studio. I can hire assistants who can get me where I want to go.

And I still make the paintings entirely by myself. My assistants don't help me paint, but they help me with all the other things. So, if this were to happen to another artist who was not as recognized and celebrated as I was, and not as financially successful as I was, no matter how much they might have wished to get back to work, it may have been an impossibility.

So again, I think that I'm very lucky.

GROSS: If you don't mind my asking, I know -- you know, often when people lose the ability to move, it's through a traumatic accident -- a car crash or, you know, some kind of terrible injury -- a fall.

CLOSE: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: But for you it was a broken artery, and so...

CLOSE: I just sort of collapsed. Mm-hmm.

GROSS: Yeah, so did -- when did you realize that you had lost movement? Did you awaken from a coma? Or was this something that came on gradually?

CLOSE: Well I had tremendous pain and I had to -- I had had the pain over the years -- it would come and go. And nobody could ever figure out what it was. And this time, the pain ended up -- I had sort of massive seizures all over my body. And then all of a sudden, I just -- my whole body just was still.

And we couldn't figure out what happened. It actually took them several days to figure out what happened to me. And you know, I -- it's -- I -- my art dealer came in and he said: "come on, get out of bed." He was convinced that I had some sort of hysterical paralysis. And it was -- it took a while for everyone to figure out what in fact did happen.

GROSS: How did you come up with a system that worked for getting your brush -- your paint brush attached to your arm in such a way that you could get the kind of mobility and control that you needed?

CLOSE: Well you know, it's funny. I was in -- I was in a rehabilitation hospital for -- after a couple of months of being in intensive care and stuff, I was moved to the rehabilitation hospital that was connected to the hospital I was in. And I began rehab, and I remember rolling down the hall one day and seeing the -- the name on the door. It said: "Occupational Therapy." I said: "oh, great, they'll help me get back to my occupation."

But in fact, it was much more about stacking spools and making things out of pipe cleaners, and I must say that the therapists were -- were wonderful people and very helpful, but it took the active intervention of my wife, who really went to bat for me and made sure they understood just how important it was for me and my sanity to be able to get back to work.

And she convinced the therapists to stop trying to get -- convince me how to do things that I didn't need to do, and to get back to what really mattered. And they found me a space in the basement of the building, and I equipped it as a studio and managed to start painting while I was still in rehabilitation.

GROSS: Were there times when you found yourself trying to make things out of pipecleaners and...

LAUGHTER

... I mean, 'cause that's what you were supposed to be doing in occupational therapy?

CLOSE: Well you know, they tried to get me to do my laundry. I said: "well you know, I didn't do my laundry before. Why should I want to do my laundry now?"

LAUGHTER

And they tried to show me how to, you know, use a computer. And I said: "I have absolutely no interest in using a computer and I really don't want to do it with a pencil stuck in my teeth." So it was -- it was a fight, because they're trying to bring everybody along and they have a kind of general attitude towards what's liable to be helpful in a person's life.

And I was looking for very specific kinds of help.

GROSS: My guest is painter Chuck Close. Since the '60s, his subject matter has been the face. Nearly 10 years ago, he had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

If you're just joining us, my guest is Chuck Close and there's a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

I want to say something else and get you to say something else about the current style that you're painting in. Your current painting style now is this really interesting mix of abstraction and representational painting.

Because what you're doing now, as we talked about, you know, your paintings are based on a series of grids. And in each grid -- each grid is like a little abstract painting. Each grid is, you know, is some circles of color or squares of color or squiggles of color.

And this little abstract grid, when taken in the context of all the other little abstract grids, forms a face.

CLOSE: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: But the faces have become more abstract than they used to be. They're not so much about finding every -- every follicle, every pore, as they once were.

CLOSE: Well, it's probably -- it's probably lucky that as I age and that -- and all of my friends age...

LAUGHTER

... that I've adopted a kinder, gentler strategy to painting because we're -- you know, I was in my 20s when I started and we weren't as wrinkled and there wasn't as much surface incident in people's faces. And so right now, it's probably a good thing that a lot of that surface information isn't -- isn't showing up.

But it -- actually, you know, one of the things I -- I get -- I get to finish one of those little paintings, one of those little abstract paintings, all -- you know, all the time, several a day, or a whole bunch of them in a day, so I get a little piece of pleasure over and over and over; and a little piece of completion over and over.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

CLOSE: And -- and that's one of the really wonderful things about the way I work. But you know, I didn't start making representational imagery because I was against abstraction. As a matter of fact, my favorite work was usually abstract, often very minimal, and often sculpture.

GROSS: Don't you feel like you found a way to combine all of those instincts into one canvas?

CLOSE: Well that's -- that's one of the nice things about it. You know, I was a -- I was a big, big fan, as a student, of deKooning (ph), who I still consider the greatest American artist of the 20th century. And I loved him so much and I was a -- I painted way more than my share of deKoonings. In fact, when I -- when I met deKooning late in life, I said: "it's very nice" -- late in his life -- I said: "it's very nice to meet somebody who's painted more deKoonings than I have."

LAUGHTER

But one of the problems with being a good student, and I was a good student, was that I knew what art looked like and I could demonstrate that I knew what it looked like, but it must look like someone else's art or it wouldn't look like art. And I couldn't find a way to work, out of deKooning and out of my heroes, without making weak impersonations of their work.

And one of the wonderful things about -- about having purged myself of all those -- purged my work of all those influences and driving myself in my own -- into my own idiosyncratic corner, where no one else's answers would fit the -- the question that I was asking myself, was that ultimately, over the years, I found a way to get a lot of that deKooning color, and some of the marks and things that I loved so much, back into my work.

But now, I get to use deKooning color and make a Chuck Close, instead of using deKooning color and making a deKooning.

GROSS: Yeah, yeah. And you know, something that's interesting about the current series of paintings, or at least latest series of paintings on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art -- it -- because they're -- it's a kind of figurative painting of a face, you know, a representational painting, but it's comprised of these little abstract paintings -- these little grids of abstract paintings -- there's this dynamism.

There's a sense of like movement and pulsing energy that the paintings have because if -- at most distances from the painting, this -- now you actually see the different components, and they just kind of pulse a little bit, so there's this energy field.

CLOSE: It's a very elusive image. It keeps shifting on you.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

CLOSE: As soon as you try -- you see -- oh, that looks like an eye, so if you look at it, all of a sudden it decomposes into its various incremental marks and stops being an eye. So it's -- it requires the active participation of the viewer, which is one of the things that I like about the way I work. It's -- there's a real kind of physicality to it, both in -- in the building of the painting and also, I think, an active role for the viewer.

You know, when -- when an artist goes into the studio, there's a kind of ritual performance that the -- that the artist performs in the studio, but no one is there to watch it. The painting is really the evidence that that ritual dance or performance took place. And it's the kind of frozen detritus of that -- of that experience. And it goes out and stands for it. It goes -- leaves the studio, goes into a gallery or museum, and it represents that performance.

But I think there's an opportunity for the viewer, if the viewer can get in sync with the work, they can vicariously experience some of the things that the artist was going through, and sort of re-experience the performance itself.

GROSS: You've done a series of self-portraits over the years, and those self-portraits are in your retrospective. How do you think your face has changed in the years that you've been painting it?

CLOSE: Well, you can watch me lose my hair.

LAUGHTER

And I suppose gone is some of the attitude of the -- and I mean "attitude" of the original self-portrait in which I was arrested in my James Dean phase, I suppose -- the angry young artist. And -- I don't know.

It's just a -- what I've tried to do is construct a kind of time line with my own image that having gone through so many permutations and changes from either, you know, the early black and white pieces or the early continuous-tone color pieces, which are actually made from superimposing a red painting, a blue painting, and a yellow painting on top of each other -- to the fingerprint pieces, the pulp paper pieces, and then the later oil paintings -- is that it becomes a kind of cross-section through the work.

So it gives a chance to sort of see all the permutations and changes and devices and materials and techniques that I've used over the years, in one -- with one basic kind of image.

GROSS: My guest is painter Chuck Close. Since the '60s, his subject matter has been the face. Nearly 10 years ago, he had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

Painter Chuck Close is my guest, and there's a retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Because you're sitting or lying all the time now -- you can't stand or walk anymore, right?

CLOSE: Well I can stand, and I...

GROSS: Oh, you can stand.

CLOSE: ... and I can take -- yeah. Mm-hmm. I could take a few steps and...

GROSS: Oh, good.

CLOSE: ... believe me, it makes all the difference. I get in places where if I were strictly confined to the wheelchair, it would be difficult.

GROSS: I guess what I'm wondering is, you know, since probably most of the time you're sitting...

CLOSE: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: ... and a lot of times you're talking to somebody I'd imagine who's standing...

CLOSE: Mm-hmm.

GROSS: Has your vision of faces changed because you're often looking up at people's faces instead of looking at eye-level?

CLOSE: Yeah, I was -- I was six foot three and I always looked over the tops of a crowd. I never -- I never felt claustrophobic in a big crowd before, because I could always see over the tops of everyone else. Now, I'm down below even the shortest people. It's given me new -- a new view on things.

I don't know -- you know, one -- I used to always sit down to paint, because I was going to be there for so long. And you know, one of the funny things about -- about being in a chair, wheel chair, is that the world looks -- I look out at a world which is essentially unchanged. I used to sit and I still sit and I look out, and the world looks exactly the same to me.

Other people look at me and they see a person, you know, now in a -- now confined to a wheelchair. So -- and even, I -- sometimes when I'll roll by a mirror, I'll be shocked. I'll look and say: "who -- ooh, who was that?"

And I almost surprise myself to see myself in a chair. And this is one of -- this has been one of the devastating things for my -- you know, for my family and my children and the people around me whom I love and who love me. This -- something like this doesn't just happen to the victim. It happens to everyone else.

And I think it's -- I think it's really almost -- I mean, I'm -- I have to cope with all this stuff. I -- there's no -- there's no -- I have no choice in the matter. But, I think it's a constant reminder for everyone around me, the changes that have taken place. Whereas I'm probably less aware of them.

GROSS: Have you dreams changed?

CLOSE: Yeah, I used to -- it's funny, when I -- I used to dream, for a number of years, I always walked in my dreams, and I was never in a wheelchair.

In the last few years, I've been in a wheelchair and then all of a sudden, I would get up and start walking. And only recently do I have whole dreams in which I never leave the wheelchair, so I guess that must -- that must signify, final, perhaps acceptance of what -- of what happened.

GROSS: Can you still take photographs now? Do you have enough control to...

CLOSE: Oh, yeah. I take all my own photographs, yeah.

GROSS: What do you look for when you're photographing a face, knowing that this photograph is supposed to be a study for the painting?

CLOSE: Well, I try to engineer into the photograph issues that I'm going to want to deal with -- formal issues and other kinds of positional issues.

GROSS: Like -- like what?

CLOSE: Well, you know, I'll -- whether I'll turn the head; whether it's shot from below; what the lighting -- a range of grays, if it's a black and white photograph, or strong darks and lights or things like that; interesting edges. But you know, since 1975, I've been photographing exclusively with a very large-format Polaroid camera, which gives you instant 20 by 24 inch prints.

So when I photograph a subject, I'm involved with a dialogue with them from the beginning, because as I shoot each -- each shot, the sitter has a chance to see what the last image looked like. Ordinarily if we shoot with film, the image is captured on the film, and later that film is processed and printed. This way, from the very beginning, they have a chance to see how it's going. I can see how it's going. And we're involved in this sort of dialogue as we work together to build an image that they can live with and that I'm pleased with; that I ultimately will want to use to make a painting.

GROSS: One last question: I'm wondering if your paralysis has affected your life as the consumer of art. In other words, if it -- if it's affected how much or the kind of painting that you want to see, movies you want to watch, music you want to listen to.

CLOSE: Well I -- I see -- I still see a lot of art. I don't see as much art as I used to 'cause I seem to be spending a lot of time doing things like this radio interview. But I really love looking at -- at art. And I love my field. I love looking at what other practitioners in my field are doing. And I spend a lot of time in museums and galleries and it's -- it's part of a great fraternity, a kind of shared experience.

And of course, artists are especially interested in showing their art to other artists -- people who know what it's like to make a painting look at it from a different point of view.

So I -- and I enjoy looking at other people's art. Every time I see something, I think: "oh, now there's something I don't have to do."

LAUGHTER

GROSS: Chuck Close, a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you very much for talking with us.

CLOSE: Thanks -- very much. It's actually very nice that -- to be on your show, because I now paint almost exclusively to public radio, and so, a great many of my paintings were actually made while I was listening to you.

GROSS: Chuck Close -- the Museum of Modern Art in New York is showing a retrospective of his work through May 26. The exhibition will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Hirshorn Museum, and the Seattle Art Museum. The catalogue is published by the Museum of Modern Art.

A documentary on Chuck Close will premier April 30th on WNET-TV in New York.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia
Guest: Chuck Close
High: Artist Chuck Close. He's been called "the most methodical artist that has ever lived in America" and the "reigning portraitist of the Information Age." He creates jumbo size faces on canvas -- 8 or 9 feet high -- copying them from photographs. They are painted in a dotted faux pointillist style. In 1989 Close suffered a stroke which left him paralyzed from the neck down, gaining partial use of his hand with a brace, he learned to paint all over again. There's currently a retrospective of his work exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. There's also a companion book: "Chuck Close."
Spec: Art; Health and Medicine; Chuck Close; Stroke
Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1998 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1998 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Chuck Close
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.