Chuck Close

The art of Chuck Close 

Here is a brief bio: "Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close (born July 5, 1940) is an American painter, artist and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Close often paints abstract portraits of himself and others, which hang in collections internationally. Close also creates photo portraits using a very large format camera. Although a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close)

'Big Self Portrait', (1967-68)
acrylic on canvas (107.5"x83.5")

'Big Self Portrait' is fifty times life size and was done by using a half a teaspoon of black paint which was thinned to the consistency of water. Close used both brushes and airbrush.  He blended with an eraser attached to a drill.  

Chuck Close Self-Portrait, 1991For this painting Close used a Polaroid photo that he mapped into grids.

Self-Portrait, 2004-2005

This is from Chuck Close's Red, Yellow, Blue exhibit at the Pace Gallery in 2015.

Things to know about Chuck Close: 

He revived the art of portrait painting.

He was a key figure in the Photorealism movement of the 1970's.

Chuck Close struggled with dyslexia and partial paralysis.

He used the grid system in his art. This became a creative expression and an area for growth for Chuck.

He also used a variety of techniques and medias. 

His work has remained relevant long after Photorealism lost it's popularity.    

Jean and Raoul Dufy, two brothers that did well as artists

Modern Art of two brothers 

Here is the bio of the younger brother: "Jean Dufy was a French Art Deco painter best known for his colorful depictions of post-war Parisian society, notably Jazz musicians who arrived with American soldiers. He was born on March 12, 1888 in La Havre, France as the brother of the well-known French Fauvist painter Raoul Dufy, who would serve as a mentor to Dufy throughout his career. Though he had no formal training, he decided to become a painter after seeing a gallery exhibition of Modern Art in La Havre—he had his first show in 1914 at Galerie Berthe Weill. For almost 30 years, Dufy was employed at a porcelain manufacturer hand-painting decorative designs of animals and flowers, for which he would win a gold medal at the 1925 L’exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs—the very exhibition where the term Art Deco was first coined. Dufy was for a time the next-door neighbor to Georges Braque, who would encourage the younger artist to experiment with Cubism. He died on May 12, 1964 in La Boissière, France."
(http://www.artnet.com/artists/jean-dufy/)

Raoul Dufy's Beautiful Paintings

 Raoul is the older brother.  He left school at the age of fourteen to work in a coffee-importing company. In 1895, when he was 18, he developed an interest in art and started taking evening classes in art at Le Havre's École des Beaux-Arts.

In 1900, after a year of military service, Dufy won a scholarship to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts where he concentrated on improving his drawing skills. The impressionist landscape painters, such as Monet and Pissaro influenced Dufy profoundly. His first exhibition (at the Exhibition of French Artists) took place in 1901. 

Henri Matisse's artwork which Dufy saw at the Salon des Indépendants in 1905, was a revelation to the young artist, and it directed his interests towards Fauvism. Les Fauves (the wild beasts) emphasized bright color and bold contours in their work. Dufy's painting reflected this aesthetic until about 1909, when contact with the work of Paul Cezanne led him to adopt a somewhat different technique. In 1920, Dufy developed his own distinctive approach. 

His work was very beautiful and decorative which caused some critics to not take him seriously.  His work has aged well and is popular today.  It is light, loose and easy to look at but that doesn't make it less significant. 

 By 1950, his hands were struck with rheumatoid arthritis and painting was difficult for him as he had to fasten the brush to his hand. In April he went to Boston to undergo an experimental treatment with cortisone. It proved successful, and some of his next works were dedicated to the doctors and researchers in the United States. Dufy died on 23 March 1953, of intestinal bleeding, which is a likely result of his continuous treatment. 

Crazy Cubist Art: Back to my roots

I'm going back to the art I did decades ago.  Although, I have continued to turn out crazy faces, I've primarily focused on landscape for many years. I plan to mostly focus on abstract people in coming months.
Abstract art is always controversial.  For me, it's the spectrum of art...realistic to nothing and somewhere in all that is the style I like to do. 
I would not have guessed that I would love abstract art so when I started out in art but over time I loved the colors and the shapes that I could create.
Examples of three recent crazy abstract works on canvas along with quotes by well-known people.

Cubism: Crazy Faces

"Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the bewildered."

quote by Al Capp

"They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things." 

quote by Constantin Brancusi

Abstract woman

"Abstract art has come into being as a necessary expression of the feelings and thoughts of our age; it has added new dimensions to creative painting."

Quote by Leonard Brooks

Cubist Woman: colorful Crazy cubist art

"You can't look at abstract art without thinking."

Quote by Patricia Cole-Ferullo

"I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it."

Quote by Chuck Close

"Abstract art is the land of the unknown.  Arriving there, the artist thinks, 

What now?"

Quote by Charlotte Rossmann

and finally...

"I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours."

Quote by Bob Dylan

Series of Drawings

Wine Glasses and Drama

Different approaches to still life drawings over the years. 

Series of oil paintings on canvas

  

These paintings are hanging on my wall at home.

Series of oil paintings on paper

Another Series of paintings

City Scape oil painting

City oil painting on paper

Cubist painting with bridge

Cubist landscape

Mountain Town

Snowy Town 

Night Time Town

Western Winter

New Cubist Crazy Faces

 New Cubist Crazy Faces and Quotes ...

David Hockey: "Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it."

“Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.” Salvador Dali 

Vincent Van Gogh: "If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced."

“The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.”  Francis Bacon 

"Good artists copy, great artists steal." Picasso

Marc Chagall: "Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love."

“To create one’s own world takes courage.” Georgia O’Keeffe 

“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.” 
Alberto Giacometti 

“Every good painter paints what he is.” Jackson Pollock 

“Life obliges me to do something, so I paint.” Rene Magritte 
Art by Charlotte

Anguish

"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up." 
-- James Baldwin

Line drawing by Charlotte

Fake Picasso

"Psst, do you want to buy a Picasso painting?"

"Sure, how much?"
"Cheap, 1.5 million"

Caught! 
Two weeks ago in Madrid, Spanish police arrested four people trying to sell a forged Picasso oil painting for 1.5 million dollars.    The canvas was a counterfeit version of a 1964 work.  These people also provided fake document signed by Paloma Picasso, one of the painter's daughters. 
Three art brokers were arrested and the current owner, a well-known Madrid antiquarian. 

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" Pablo Picasso

Forged Picasso painting