Word: paint
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this time, I feel immune to stares, so I decide to eat dinner in front of all the House tutors and my friends. Besides, I’m so hungry I would walk in wearing nothing but green paint if I had to. To my surprise, nobody really reacts to my clothes, until my friend Nancy turns to me at the drink machine and comments, "Hey, Evelyn, is that a new outfit? I like it." A Day In the Life of a Muslim Woman...
...take-it-or-leave-it approach to the human face was deeply related to the growing interest among his Minimalist peers in sculptural materials set forth as they were: strips of rubber or felt on the floor, cinder blocks, polystyrene or slabs of rusty steel propped together. The paint Close applied was molecule-thin, spritzed on the painstakingly prepared gesso surface with an airbrush, in strict accordance with the grid to which Close enlarged the original photo. It suggested an obsessive involvement on the artist's part, but kept the viewer distant, with nothing sensuous to hook onto--unless...
...then proceeded to render each square of the canvas with each of the colors, successively, exquisitely controlling the amount of each hue per pixel. There was a yellow face, then a blue overlay, and then with the magenta one--presto, full exact color. No room for deviation or correction. Paint-by-numbers raised to the nth degree. It goes so far out in the direction of illusion that it hits abstraction coming back...
...what point does an array of colored squares in a regular grid begin to turn into a recognizable image? The question touches on the mystery of Realist painting--how it is, for instance, that when looking close up at a Velasquez you see a flurry of gray-and-pink spots and streaks, and when you move back a couple of feet, that same patch has become a glistening silver embroidery on rose velvet. All of Close's art recalls his fixation on this effect, the brain seeking illusion in pattern, questing for clues: Close will break a face down into...
Close, when a student at Yale, was enraptured by the work of the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning: he loved his color and luscious paint surface, while realizing that they couldn't possibly be imitated. Imitating de Kooning was the bane of student existence: no originality could come of it. But Close, in his ruminative way, hankered after the paradise of the senses that de Kooning's touch represented, and it surfaces in the work that he had begun to do just before his paralysis in 1989 and was able to develop after his partial recovery. The dots and pixels...