Self Portraits inspired by Chuck Close

When I was in New York in March for the NAEA Convention, I had the very exciting opportunity to see contemporary American artist Chuck Close speak. His lecture inspired me to spice up my usual 7th grade portrait project and attempt a painted piece like his. Close has been a leading figure in contemporary art since the early 1970s. He is best known for the monumental faces he has painted in thousands of tiny airbrush bursts, thumbprints, or looping multi-color brushstrokes using an abstract, highly illusionistic and systematical means of creating portraiture. Viewed at a distance, these large-scale pieces are still highly realistic in nature. Close starts with a photo, covers it with a grid, transfers the grid, enlarged to scale, onto the big blank canvas, and then starts in one corner, applying paint to the squares, repeating the process in pass after pass from different angles. He makes no underlying sketch to guide him– just the grid. The ears and eyes and locks of hair appear only as the regions of hue and dark and light incrementally coalesce into shapes. Form and line, too, are discovered.

Seventh graders used a similar process to create their portraits (but on a much smaller scale!). First, digital photos of the students were manipulated in Photoshop to reduce the portrait to six values/tones and photos were covered with a grid. Students used the photograph to transfer the outlines of their image onto their canvas, using their grids as a map. Once transferred, students focused solely on the values and subtle shapes present within each individual square, not fretting about the details of facial features. For each value, they mixed three paint colors (18 colors in total) ranging from very light to almost black. Then, the piece was painted square by square (in progress pics here) until the forms of their faces began to take shape amid the rainbow of colors! Students added the Chuck Close signature circles and shapes within each grid square to add to the abstract feel and to reinforce the values. Though time consuming, these portraits are fanciful and striking, and art students had a blast creating them!