By Laura Kaminker

Photo by Ellen Page Wilson, courtesy of Pace Wildenstein Galleries

Chuck Close paints heads. Big heads. Close creates enormous images--a typical canvas measures 9 feet by 7 feet--of the faces of friends, family and other artists. His 1968 hyper-realistic self-portrait, depicting the artist in severe black and white--uncombed, unshaven and distinctly unadorned--has been called a "monumental mugshot". Since then, Close's heads have evolved into what appears to be post-modern pointillism, the 19th century technique in which dots of color create a form.

This artist doesn't wait for inspiration; he doesn't believe in it. He believes in work. Close paints five days a week, six hours a day (nine in summer), in three-hour intervals. He begins with a camera, chooses a photograph, and then superimposes onto it a precise grid. Next he transcribes the grid onto canvas, then applies paint to the boxes. When he is finished, some four or five months later, the 1,200 squares are filled with dots, daubs and markings, each box a tiny abstract painting unto itself. Together they form a portrait, titled Janet or Stanley or Dorothea.

Museum-goers at a Chuck Close exhibit all do the same thing: they walk up to a painting, noses nearly touching the canvas, to examine the colors and textures of the individual squares. Then they slowly walk backwards, stopping when the entire image comes into focus. Then they walk towards the painting. Then they do it again.

In 1988, Close became something besides a famous artist. When an artery in his spine collapsed, he became a famous artist in a wheelchair, a C3-T8 (incomplete) quad. During his rehab, Close's wife, Leslie Rose Close, urged his therapists to set up a space where he could paint. "My wife knew how important it was for my sanity to get back to work," he explains. "She knew I'd be a miserable human being if I couldn't."

In the hospital, Close painted a portrait of artist and friend Alex Katz. When he got out, he moved to an accessible studio, got an electric easel (the painting descends into a slot in the floor), strapped on a wrist brace, popped in a jazz CD, and continued painting. "My process hasn't changed very much," says Close, now 58. "I used to sit in a forklift and I'd move around. Now the painting moves around instead."

1998 seems to be The Year of Chuck Close. In the spring, New York's Museum of Modern Art launched a retrospective of his career, which traveled to Chicago before its current run in Washington D.C., and will appear next in Seattle. There has been a PBS documentary, a children's book and a deluge of press.

I spoke with Close in his downtown Manhattan studio, where a portrait of artist Jasper Johns looked on, waiting to be completed. I am happy to report that this art-world celebrity and high-profile quad is a warm, generous, happily outspoken man with plenty to say about art, work, disability and life.

LK: Many stories about you still focus on the "overcoming tragedy" angle.

"Once I got enough arm movement that I realized I was going to be able to paint, I just wanted to make the paintings that I had always wanted to make." Photo by Josh Aronson

CC: I'm not interested in that, it's boring as hell. I had a long, successful career as an artist, long before anything happened to me. I think the only thing that's interesting is that I got back to work, and is the work any good? I completely reject the notion that I'm any kind of a hero. I've just been very lucky.

First of all, I'm lucky I already was somebody. There are so many kids in rehab hospitals, because of diving accidents or motorcycle accidents or being shot. They're so young, they don't have anything to return to. I was also lucky that I was self-employed; I didn't have to convince an employer that I was capable of getting back to work, I only had to convince myself.

There are two other ways in which I am very lucky. One is that I am by nature an optimistic person, for which I can take no credit; that's just who I am. Other people are by nature pessimistic, for which they should not be blamed; that's just who they are. I think my optimism helped me get back to work.

But the last reason I reject the idea that I am any kind of hero is that I could afford to get back to work. I made a lot of money with my art, so I could build a wheelchair-accessible studio and hire assistants. I have excellent medical insurance, for which I pay an arm and a leg. Even so, I have about $50,000 a year in unreimbursed medical expenses. If I didn't make that $50,000, plus enough to live on, I'd have to go on Medicaid and become a ward of the state. So another artist, equally committed, equally determined to return to painting, but without the income, might not have been able to.

LK: I appreciate your awareness of luck. There's so much of that, "If you want it badly enough and you try hard enough, you can do anything."

Before his paralysis, Close painted an unflinchingly realistic style, as in "Big Self Portrait," 1968 Photo from Walker Art Center, courtesy Pace Wildenstein

CC: That's a blame-the-victim mentality. In rehab I saw people with the greatest attitudes who struggled every day, worked so hard in PT, and never got one iota better. Then there'd be somebody else with the worst attitude in the world--lazy, nasty, whiny, wouldn't work hard--and they got better and walked out. To suggest that if somebody only had a different attitude they'd get better is just this side of criminal.

LK: When you have such a distinctive style, how do you keep it from becoming stale and cliched? How do you keep it fresh?

CC: I suppose some people would say that I haven't.

LK: For yourself, then.

CC: Actually, that's the indicator that I use. How am I feeling about the work? Does it feel like I'm getting too good at it? Is it too easy? Ease and facility are the enemy of the artist. If you do something for too long, you simply display how well you can do that thing, and it becomes emptier and emptier. So what I've always tried to do is alter the variables--change the materials, techniques, procedures, processes, scale, whatever--to keep myself off-balance so that the search is still on. And to get myself in trouble. It's important to be in trouble.

LK: How do you hold the vision of the whole painting in your mind while you're working on the little boxes?

CC: You don't. You can't. Nor should you. If you worried about the whole all the time, you'd be paralyzed--no pun intended. You can refer back--I look up every once in a while to see if what I'm doing here agrees with what I was doing up there--but you can only work where you are. How do you make a sweater? A whole sweater--who knows? But if you knit one and purl two long enough, you get a sweater. And it's in those little movements, those increments, that the sweater gets made.

When I was in school, I used to work all over, all at once. But I was never well suited for that, I found it very frustrating, overwhelming. It has a lot to do with my learning disability--I had to break things down into small, bite-sized decisions. And it's actually a great way to work. I think it's very much related to what used to be called "women's work." Women always had so many things to do, they could knit for a while, put it down, go start dinner, come back and knit a little bit more, put it down, go weed the garden. ... It doesn't require that you reinvent the wheel every single day. Each day, you add positively to what you've already done and it just keeps building.

When you're done, you might not like that sweater as much as you like other sweaters you've made. So next time, you change something about the material or the colors. But you have a belief in the process, and while you're doing it, you give yourself over to that process. I've found this way of working very liberating.

"Lucas II" reveals Close's evolution toward his current style. Photo by Bill Jacobson, coutesy of Pace Wildenstein

LK: When I first saw your work where you use the grid, I thought of pointillism. What relationship does your work bear to that style?

CC: That's what most people think of first, and obviously there is some connection. But I don't think it's that accurate. I guess the artist I'm most often linked with is Seurat, whom I love. He's a wonderful painter and absolutely one of the great draftsmen of all time. But actually, his pointillist paintings don't really do what we think they do. That is, the majority of the marks in any given area are the generic color of that material. So if it's grass, the lion's share of the marks will be green, if it's sky or water, the lion's share will be blue, and so forth. The other colors in there just sort of modify it. I try to make the skin out of a color--by neutralizing or canceling or combining all kinds of colors--that you're never going to find in anybody's face.

The works that I actually feel a closer relationship to are mosaics. Not the Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, the glitzy, gold ornate ones, but the really humble floor mosaics that you get in the South [of Italy]. The [Ravenna] mosaics are so high up, you can't see the incremental unit very well. But the ones on the floor are clunky, they're made of big chunks of stone, so you see the face or the animal or whatever is being depicted, but you also never forget that you're looking at a chunk of stone. It's that relationship--between the image built and the material used and the incremental unit itself--that interests me.

LK: Why are the heads so large?

CC: I've always said that the bigger they are, the longer they take to walk by, and therefore the harder they are to ignore. That's at least part of it. I wanted to rip it loose from the context in which we normally see the face--much bigger and harder to see as a whole, so it forces you to scan it, make it a kind of Brobdignagian world, like you're traveling across the surface, sometimes at some distance, not completely aware of what you're looking at. All this information, all the detail, and you can still get lost in it.

LK: Do you have any interest in art that addresses disability?

CC: When I was lying in the hospital, paralyzed from here [indicates throat] down, unable to move at all, I thought, what am I going to do? I thought I could do some kind of conceptual work, and have other people execute it. Since I wouldn't want anyone else to paint my paintings, I imagined some kind of installation or performance pieces, and I thought it might be interesting to do work about the hospital, disability, stuff like that. Then when I got some movement in my neck and head, I thought, I could paint with a brush in my teeth and make really small paintings. And I thought, maybe it would be interesting to make paintings about disability. And I didn't think about that other performance stuff anymore. But once I got enough arm movement that I realized I was going to be able to paint, I just wanted to make the paintings that I had always wanted to make. I went back to the method and the subject matter that I loved and tried to make more paintings that I liked.

LK: I read that you "don't want to be a poster boy for quadriplegia". Does that mean you don't identify with the disability community?

CC: No, not at all. I do a lot of work with both learning disabled and physically disabled people. I'm not ashamed of my disability, and I don't hide it. I'm out in public all the time, perfectly happy to talk about it and show people how I do things. I just don't want it to be the focus of the stories about me.

I'm really glad that there's a disability community. And I'm really glad that there are militantly active people fighting for access. I work with Hospital Audiences trying to improve access to cultural institutions. We do assessments of every cultural institution--every gallery, every museum, every theater--and we publish a book called "Access For All," which tells you how wide the doors are, how many steps there are, how you get in. A blind person and a person in a wheelchair go to each site to do the assessments.

LK: I once read an interview with a blind guitarist who said that people routinely ask him if he listens to a lot of Ray Charles. Do people often mention Christopher Reeve to you?

CC: No, but I will tell you the most offensive thing people say. Literally, I don't think a week has gone by that this doesn't happen. I'm in a museum or gallery, and people are walking around and their legs are tired or their feet ache, and they come over to me and say, "You're so lucky that you get to sit down."

LK: How do you react?

CC: It depends on how they said it and how cranky I am. Either I say, "No, I'm not, I'd much rather be walking around like you, you asshole." Or else I just let it go.

LK: I want to ask about "Alex," the painting you did while you were still in rehab. Does it reflect your experience at all? When you see it now, does it evoke strong feelings?

CC: I don't attach too much importance to it. I probably wouldn't have kept it, but my wife wouldn't let me sell it. She thought it was too important. But two interesting things happened with that painting. I'd already taken the photograph for it before I was in the hospital, and his face looks considerably sadder in the painting than it does in the photograph. So that probably sneaked in. But on the other hand, the palette brightened considerably. So I think there's also a sense of celebration.

LK: I have here a review of Chuck Close Up Close [a children's biography of Close]. The reviewer calls it "a simply written yet fascinating account of how nearly insurmountable obstacles can often spur artistic growth."

Photo by Josh Aronson

CC: What a bunch of shit that is. One of the reasons that I stopped believing in God and left the church was the bizarre notion that God tests those people who can handle the test, and you'll be a better person for having been tested. Only a God who was perverse beyond belief would ever come up with such a way to test the faith of his followers. I'm somebody who routinely put rocks in my shoes throughout my life, but that's very different from having rocks placed in your shoes. This is not something that I would wish on anybody because it is going to release some pent-up creativity.

LK: Did your disability help you grow as an artist in any way?

CC: No. No. In fact, a kind of conspiracy evolves in rehab hospitals. There's a kind of rehab culture, a rehab state of mind. And the conspiracy that both patient and doctor enter into is: You will never work again. I had doctors ask me--or they wouldn't even ask me, while I'm sitting there, they'd look over my head and ask my wife--"What was it that he used to do?" The assumption, of course, was that I'd (a) never want to get back to work and (b) never be capable of it.

I went to occupational therapy with the hope that they would help me get back to my occupation. But they wanted to help me do my laundry. I never did my laundry before--why would I want to do it now? In the rehab culture, doctors, shrinks, and some--though not all--therapists unite in a conspiracy with the patient to figure out how they will live, not how they will be productive. You are preparing yourself for a lifetime of watching TV while you're on the dole.

I think it's an incredible indictment of the capitalist system that given half a chance to never work again, most people would choose it. Because their jobs are so deadeningly boring and meaningless, who would be interested in getting back to work? But work is salvation. The time you spend working flies by and the time that you're not working moves at a glacial pace. Not only is it your salvation, but it's ennobling. You're pulling your own weight and you're contributing to society and you're doing something important, and those things matter--in terms of self-worth and not pitying yourself.

LK: How old were you when you became aware that you had a learning disability?

CC: I was always aware that something was wrong, and so was my mother. But in the 1940s and 50s the words "learning disability" or "dyslexia" didn't exist. I was simply dumb and lazy. But my parents knew I was intelligent. I just couldn't memorize stuff, and I couldn't spit it back on tests. I couldn't recognize certain things. Luckily my parents helped me feel special and celebrated my skills, and didn't dwell on my deficits. And my mother fought the system, all the way through--to the point where it was so annoying, I wanted her to stop.

LK: When was it actually diagnosed?

CC: My 25-year-old daughter was 8, so that would have been some time in the 70s.

LK: When you had your spinal cord injury, did you draw on any of your old coping skills?

CC: Oh sure, it put me in very good stead to deal with what happened to me.

LK: How?

CC: I have a survivor mentality. I have a we-shall-overcome sense of resolve. I have a strong questioning nature, which kept me from being a compliant patient, so I took charge of my own rehabilitation. And my learning disabilities, along with the fact that I lost my father at the age of 11, taught me that something terrible can happen to you and you can still be happy again. A lot of people are dreading some disaster, not knowing if it will devastate them or if they will survive. But I already knew. I knew I'd survive, I knew I'd work, and I knew I'd be happy again.

Laura Kaminker is a New Mobility contributing editor.