Chuck Close Janet Analysis
The Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s
Janet by Chuck Close
The Final Janet of its series
FNAR 377
Dr. Pendleton
“I remember Jack Beal once criticized me in print for not having any books on artists before 1945. Jack always felt that being a realist was some king of ‘us against them’ moral crusade. He thought that Frank Stella was the devil or something. It’s true that I don’t have a lot of books on Velasquez and the history of portrait painting and that I was really interested in trying to make art today. I was much more interested in work that was being made today than I was in the art of the past.”1 This quote is from artist Chuck Close, who was a key player in the Photorealist movement. He creates monumental portraits of his friends, family, and fellow artists. A series of the same photograph, all titled Janet, are done in different mediums and show the progression of Chuck Close’s career as an artist.
Photorealism began in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The movement itself evolved from Pop Art and countered Abstract Expressionism and Minimalist art movements. Other Photorealists include Malcolm Moreley and Richartd Estes who painted urban and city settings. Close is one of the very few modern realists or …show more content…
I wanted to do something very different from the gesture of making an image with one silk-screen squeegee stroke, and I certainly didn’t want to make movie stars. He rally nailed all that down. But Warhol was extremely important for me in terms of building an image that was also a painting… Certainly his life in the art world was different than mine and remained different from mine because he was surrounded by a huge cast of characters who helped him make everything. Even though I have many assistants, I still make the art the old-fashioned way, one stroke at a time, all by
Janet by Chuck Close
The Final Janet of its series
FNAR 377
Dr. Pendleton
“I remember Jack Beal once criticized me in print for not having any books on artists before 1945. Jack always felt that being a realist was some king of ‘us against them’ moral crusade. He thought that Frank Stella was the devil or something. It’s true that I don’t have a lot of books on Velasquez and the history of portrait painting and that I was really interested in trying to make art today. I was much more interested in work that was being made today than I was in the art of the past.”1 This quote is from artist Chuck Close, who was a key player in the Photorealist movement. He creates monumental portraits of his friends, family, and fellow artists. A series of the same photograph, all titled Janet, are done in different mediums and show the progression of Chuck Close’s career as an artist.
Photorealism began in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The movement itself evolved from Pop Art and countered Abstract Expressionism and Minimalist art movements. Other Photorealists include Malcolm Moreley and Richartd Estes who painted urban and city settings. Close is one of the very few modern realists or …show more content…
I wanted to do something very different from the gesture of making an image with one silk-screen squeegee stroke, and I certainly didn’t want to make movie stars. He rally nailed all that down. But Warhol was extremely important for me in terms of building an image that was also a painting… Certainly his life in the art world was different than mine and remained different from mine because he was surrounded by a huge cast of characters who helped him make everything. Even though I have many assistants, I still make the art the old-fashioned way, one stroke at a time, all by