Chuck Close

Yesterday I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the self-portraits of the American artist Chuck Close are on exhibit. The works range from small sketches to giant oils and composite photographs. They cover the entire spectrum of his idiosyncratic self-portraits from 1967 to 2005.

Close is known for his use of circles, ovals, and diamond shapes in variegated colors to construct his portraits. He has also experimented with all kinds of media, including plugs of handmade paper in different shades of grey that he attaches to a canvas or a panel.

Most of his self-portraits are head-on views, as though he had been set up for a passport photo; there are a few done in profile, as in a police mug shot. All are finely crafted, and engage the viewer in a way that is, for me, almost impossible to describe. You see the artist first as a young man with long, unruly hair, and a cigarette pointing straight out at the viewer. Each succeeding portrait becomes a variation of the first large one, and these variations progress through the years until you see him as a man in his sixties, balding and jowly and always somewhat stern. A life unfolds in a face over a span of thirty-eight years.

I've included two monochromatic images for comparison. These small images do not do justice to the large ones at the exhibition, and certainly not to the vibrant application of spots of color that Close has made his own.

The show has been at SFMOMA since last November; there is still time to see it before it closes at the end of February.