Chuck Close at the Corcoran Gallery of Art

Mike and I went to see artist Chuck Close speak at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. It was a fantastic experience. Though I'm not generally a fan of photorealist art (I admire it, of course, but it seems a bit soulless to me), Chuck Close's work is truly amazing. For one thing, it's photorealistic from a distance, but up close you can see that he constructs a lot of his paintings with dots or finger prints. Additionally, the canvases are huge, sometimes taking up entire walls in galleries, so the scale alone is impressive. They're really stunning.

Another amazing thing about him that I didn't know until I saw him speak: he has face blindness, which means he's unable to recognize faces. This is especially mind-blowing when you think about how all of his paintings are of faces. He's also dyslexic, and talked about how important arts education was to him in his early years. He credits art with enabling him to get through middle school and eventually graduate with an MFA from Yale, because he was sometimes able to construct intricate dioramas instead of having to turn in a paper. If not for art classes, he believes he would have been labeled "retarded" and his life would have taken a much different trajectory.

After the talk, Chuck Close and his biographer signed copies of their book. Here the biographer talks with Mike about how he came to be known as Floogee. (Sorry for the quality and orientation. I thought it was still charming enough to post.)