Hyper-realism #4 Chuck Close

Just as before, this is my 4th installment of my 5 part series of Hyper-realism painters. Bringing this outrageously detailed artform to my audience is my goal. Hyperrealism is considered an advanced for of photorealism with methods used to resemble a high resolution photgraph. The term is primarily applied an independent art movement in United States and Europe that has developed primarily since early 2000s.

Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close is an American painter born July 5, 1940. At the age of 14, Close saw an exhibition of Jackson Pollack's abstract paintings, which helped inspire him to become a painter. He achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Chuck Close has a vital focus exclusively on portraiture, a genre often under-recognized in contemporary art. Since the 1960s, Close has used his inimitable style of realistic painting to portray a wide range of subjects. His style started with portraits done in large scale with pencil and charcoal. Included in this set was one of the more famous self portraits. He moved on over times into oils on canvas and even using a unique style of 3" squares all consisting of different swirls and shapes of paint to ultimately make a portrait once stepped back away from the surface.Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors. His works hang in the world's most prestigious museums, he is considered by many to be one of the most influential painters of our time and ARTNews magazine says he is one of the 50 most influential people in the art world. He is so big he turned down a major retrospective at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art because promises were broken. He chose the Museum of Modern Art instead. No one can recall an artist ever turning down the Met.

There is plenty more than can be said about Chuck, but the bottom line is he the most well known artist of this genre, he had to be on the list. let's get to the art!