Word: portraits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...face of someone you probably don't know and who has no special public existence. (All Close's sitters were his friends, mostly artists such as the sculptor Richard Serra or the painter Joe Zucker, none of them well known at the time. He has never done a commissioned portrait.) He began his big faces in the late 1960s, working directly from black-and-white photographs he took himself. The results were very strange. The images weren't "expressive." Their obsession is with fact, an overload of fact--not in the least with character. Their eyes don't contact...
...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 round dabs of oil paint (as in Self-Portrait, 1986), or spots of pastel, or even thickly textured platelets of papier-mache glued on top of one another, looking to extend the ways in which repetitive, grid-organized painting turns into the irresistible semblance of a face. All the time, the surface gets richer and more baroque...
...with highly colored microforms--lozenges, doughnuts, figure-eights--tossing around in them. The image of the head coarsens and blurs, breaks off at some edges, acquires a mysterious density. It's like looking at someone through ripple glass, and it produces striking results--as in Roy II, 1994, a portrait of the painter Roy Lichtenstein, whose profile (owing to the constraints of Close's grid) hardens into the likeness of Dick Tracy while keeping a beautiful fluidity of surface. Finally, Close has been able to get some vibrancy into the results of his system: the work of the imagination...
...give me a weapon." Perhaps not quite as arresting as Raymond Chandler, but at least killing things is a reasonably noir concept. Daring browsers can unmask this dark poet brash enough to call herself Catwoman simply by clicking on the little kitty, with anticlimactic results--Catwoman's portrait displays a homely sixteen-year old posing in front of a couple of butterfly stickers. Her frumpy red dress doesn't do much to complete the Cat motif either; a visit to boudoir-noir.com might be in order...
...years, Lawrence Kelleher says he knows how difficult it is to come across personal possessions of political figures. One of his most prized items is a letter Harry S. Truman sent to his personal photographer thanking him for taking what was widely considered Truman's favorite personal portrait...