This self portrait by artist Chuck Close is a painting that has really caught my imagination. Our faces reveal so much about who we are. This image offers the viewer a fascinating entrance into the artists world by simultaneously providing a retrospective and introspective painting that challenges the viewers perceptions. The painting is not built up of big elaborate brush strokes, but rather constructed of little dots, squiggles and circles. It is the accumulation of all these dots, squiggles and circles that together add up to the larger structure of the face. Unlike a photograph that captures a moment in time, the artist has meticulously constructed and deconstructed this image incrementally, that is one unit at a time, using a grid technique so as to create each square to formal elements of design. In this sense each component/grid is a piece of art.
The face itself is captured in a neutral state. This suggests the artist does not want to impose subjectively on the viewers reading but allow the viewer to decode the various intimate components embedded within the imagery. The methodology applied by Chuck Close in showing the many facets of his expression(s) by breaking it down into fragments and simple shapes, reminds me of the cubists approach when examining the subject matter, often showing many different aspects and angles at the same time. The image is quite confrontational and really challenges the viewer when seen from a distance, although the viewer may not quite be aware of what it is that he is looking at. As the viewer moves closer, the face becomes blurred while new intimate detail emerges drawing the viewer ever closer, until one finds oneself inspecting the intricate marks of a beard, than falling into nostril , almost like in the Brobdingnag world of "Gulliver's Travel", crawling across a vast landscape, stumbling across the edge of the glasses, than the corner of an ear.
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