Chuck Close

(USA, 2007, 116 mins)

digital video

Wisconsin Premiere

cinematographer: Mead Hunt, Ken Kobland, David Leitner
editor: Marion Cajori
fine cut editor: Ken Kobland
producer: Marion Cajori
associate producer: Kipjaz Savoie
production company: The Art Kaleidoscope Foundation
cast: Leslie Close, Janet Fish, Mark Greenwold, Philip Glass, Arne Glimcher, Alex Katz, Klaus Kertess, Brice Marden, Elizabeth Murray Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Lucas Samara, Kiki Smith, Robert Storr, Kirk Varnedoe, Joe Zucker

• artkaleidoscope.org/close.html

The details of creating a massive portrait painting are exquisitely rendered on screen in this documentary of famed painter Chuck Close. His best-known works are very technique-driven, and this film captures the process very effectively. First is the photo session of his subject. Then a grid of squares is laid over the photo, each square to be transferred to the full-size canvas. But Close, who relies on aides since a spinal injury 20 years ago, resists a strict realism in recreating the photographic images. As his brush hits the canvas he fills each square with odd colored marks: utterly mystifying close up; brilliantly forming a recognizable face from a distance. “[Director] Cajori signally refuses to ascribe to a one-way artistic progression in Close's career output — often revisiting his disturbing early pieces. A still shot of Close lounging between two gray-toned paintings, which creepily mime the uber-realism of photography, brings home the visceral shockwaves these works must have sent through the art world of the time. Cajori also eschews any My Left Foot vision of the artist as heroic survivor: Whatever the method, from airbrushing to meticulous thumb-printing, Close's vision remains remarkably, inventively consistent, in and out of a wheelchair.” — Ronnie Scheib, Variety.

Sponsored By:

UW Department of Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education

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