I got to meet one of the biggest names in contemporary painting this past weekend. CHUCK CLOSE!!! I went with some friends to an opening for him at Blum & Poe, the first in a while in the LA area. I got to tell him a story about being yelled at by security guards at the National Gallery in DC, when trying to inspect one of his paintings. The painting was Fannie, and its a portrait of an old woman made entirely of thumbprints. I was 14 or so, and was leaning in to see this wrinkle in her clothes. He told me that happens to him a lot. I went with a few school friends and respective spouses who shot a picture of us with him. We were all gushing, because we are art students and have all studied painting. That's me on the left, with Chuck in the middle, Kristen, and Stephanie on the far right. The painting behind him is one of his self portraits. For those of you who don't know his work, Close has a rare condition called face blindness, where he can't recognize faces. He started painting portraits of people using a grid system to blow their faces up to larger-than-life size as a way to help him remember the faces. He's famous for the size of the paintings, as well as this 1970's aesthetic of the portraits. In another room of the gallery there were some paint on paper pieces done with colored dots. He layered the colored dots with smaller one of contrasting colors to really help push the effect: a newspaper-print looking painting.
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