Chuck Close ‘Bob’ 1970

This monumental work by Chuck Close might prompt you to question what exactly you are seeing. A man stares out at us through silver-rimmed glasses with a slightly stunned expression on his face. His simple t-shirt is well-worn and his hair is tousled. This painting is all but indistinguishable from the photograph that it was based on, but in person, we see that it has been rendered in airbrush with painstaking attention to detail. It is incredible, isn't it? White paint was used occasionally for the highlights, but more often Close scraped away black pigment using a razorblade. There are also glimpses of pencil marks to be seen at the edges of the canvas - remnants of the original grid, which the artist left visible to reveal his method of scaling-up images one grid-square at a time. Chuck Close lives with various disabilities, including Prosopagnosia, which affects his ability to recognize faces. Close acknowledges that his ‘particular learning difficulties’ have influenced his ‘decisions as an artist.’ For example, his system of, ‘breaking images down into small bite-size units’ developed in response to feeling ‘overwhelmed by the overall image’ as he describes it. You might be wondering why Chuck Close would go to such lengths to create what a camera could capture instantaneously? But that is the genius of this work, isn't it? And what makes us linger so long in front of it, transfixed by his incredible attention to detail and his technical precision. Referred to in the title simply as Bob, the subject of this painting is one of the artist’s friends, Robert Israel, a New York based opera designer. Bob recalled that Close’s decision to paint a person depended on ‘whether they were a friend, but also on the specific topology of their face.’ Close did not attempt to capture his personal relationship with his sitters who are frequently posed with just neutral expressions, but rather to conduct a formal analysis of their face.