A Dangling Conversation About Chuck Close and An Exploration of the Self

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It all started when my wife sent me a link to a July 13th essay by Wil S. Hylton in the New York Time. The essay is titled The Mysterious Metamorphosis of Chuck Close - an artist whose work I hadn't really encountered before.  I loved the essay for a couple of reasons.  First, Mr. Hylton is an obvious devotee of long-form writing. And second, he uses all those words to paint an utterly fascinating portrait of an immensely talented and, apparently, equally conflicted portrait artist.  So, to fully play along with this conversation you should read that essay: http://nyti.ms/29EJ2ST

It might actually be best to read that essay and then take a break to mull it over a bit. As I say, Wil is a long-form kind of guy.  So after I had mulled it over for awhile, I sent it along to Ken Zagacki, my friend, colleague and Department Head here at State with whom I delight in musing about things artistic.  With his permission I’ll share his response:

"I like the theory, posed by the author, about Close's fractured identity as he ages and especially as both his mind and body wither. More specifically, on the one hand the brightly colored ("lurid?") self portraits affirm life at the end; on the other hand the somewhat faded color of "Self-Portrait (No Glasses)," with eyes peering from the background darkness, depict the artist slipping into oblivion.

You're an artist: What do you think?"  

So I thought about that for awhile, and made this contribution to the conversation:

If I am experiencing any type of artistic experience that parallels Close's portraiture, it seems to manifest itself more in my writing than in my images. Close has been a painter all his life, hence his artistic/philosophical/spiritual evolution is perhaps best revealed in his painting.  While I taught photography and television production for a number of years early in my career, my own interest in drawing, etc., - actually putting my hand to paper - is relatively new, maybe 10 or a dozen years. [See www.colormechilledout.com] So as a newbie, my efforts in that arena are relatively unsophisticated. However, I have been playing with poetry, juvenile novels, essays, short stories, scholarly articles and textbooks for almost 60 years.  So words, more than images, may better capture my own evolution. 

That being said, what resonates most with me in this story is Close's seeming desire to explore "that which he does not understand."  I suppose that as a teacher and an academician, I tend to try to give the impression that I understand what I am talking about - and in the classroom, anyhow, I usually do.  These days, however, I am far more interested, as Close seems to be, in that which I do not understand. Hence my more meaningful writing on this blog springs most often from what seems to be a shadow of a truth tethered rather tenuously to that which I think I know or believe. Close now chops his self-portraits into grids, and then seems to explore how the self being represented shifts as he fills in the various squares. For me the verbal parallel is a process of weaving of exploratory sentences around that initial shadow of truth; a process that allows me to better understand my represented self. Sometimes that results in some type of progressive understanding of life and existence, other times it simply shifts the direction of subsequent inquiries. 

From that perspective, my essays here are parallels to Close's self-portraits, in that they are verbal snapshots; progressive written explorations of that with which we are in continual contact, that which we pretend to understand, but which, in reality, is the shrouded subject of continual exploration - the self.

And yes, there is an increased intensity of focus that comes with age, illness, and an increased awareness of mortality.

And that is what I think, at the moment anyhow .  .  . 

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