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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
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Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
I've been seeing colours lately. This may have something to do with the fact that I'm several shades of red myself. Unluckily, I managed to contract chicken pox in the heat of a Parisian summer. They say the adult version is bad, and I can vouch for this statement fully. Pretty bloody horrible.
Back to colour—and not mine. I stumbled upon some notes on the artist Chuck Close, notes no doubt scribbled down from an interview I had read based on a recent exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration. So we can still thank museum PR departments and media for introducing us to socially useful things. Now if these same PR people can only resist the desire to tag-line everything to snazzy auditory epithets; in this case dubbing Chuck Close as the "reigning artist of the Information Age." As if that vacuous statement has any meaning whatsoever. But moving on...
The below images are samples of his work, which can be seen on his website. His work is quite ubiquitous, so I'm sure many of these images trigger recollections.
The first, if rather obvious thing, about this artist is his faux pointillist approach and style.
(Georges Seurat and friends are the western innovators of the pointillism school in post-impressionist France. His masterpiece, "Un dimanche après-midi à l'Ile de la Grande Jatte" (1884) is wonderful to see in the flesh. I'm fortunate to have the Musée d'Orsay close by with excellent pieces of this work.)
Close takes photos of faces, blows them up super large, and then using a grid paints the picture, showing every possible detail. Hence his rather literal name, Chuck "Close". And his work is exactly that: close-up and personal. Close freely admits his subjects are not always very happy with how his paintings turn out. That's not his concern. As he sees it, his job is to amplify the story that's submerged or resting in people's faces. Invariably what he sees in these faces appears distorted, unflattering, characterized to some extreme, and may even be deeply unsettling, a truth revealed about themselves or the human condition, something betrayed by a slight expression in the eyes, an arched eyebrow, or sagging mouth. Universal yet highly personal. Abstract but intimate. Geometric meshed with the organic.
Close claims that he is in "non-interference" camp of artists. That is, it's very important to him that he doesn't force an interpretation of what he's seeing on the viewer. He wants people to make their own assessments of the story the face is telling or at least give some room for individual narration. This is also part of his own process. Each point he places, Close explains, is like a laying down a building block, but each building block doesn't determine what the building will eventually look like. This design emerges slowly until he sees the image as a whole.
When asked how and why he developed this approach, Close admits that he is fundamentally lazy, had no patience, and was nervous wreck most of the time when it came to his artistic projects. Sound familiar? At one point, however, he said he didn't want to just accept his nature —or indeed any kind nature, the green or red-blooded kind —and decided to created a process to counter and keep in check his tendencies. With an incremental approach, Close says, "you don't have to wait for inspiration. You don't have to wait for good days or bad days." Without being pejorative, Close likens his approach to "woman's work," like quilting, which as a process had certain advantages: women could do it in their odd moments, and start and stop it quickly when other duties (laundry, fixing meals or feeding a family) intervened.
His one-point-at-a-time technique has a lot to teach us creative types who routinely get mired by pathos and neuroses, whether it be the quest for an illusive perfection, paralysis-by-analysis blockages, or just garden variety inspirational dead-ends.
"Why should I get out of bed today"
"Is my work really crap?"
"Will anyone really give two hoots about what I write?"
"This is just a waste of time".
Give up. Give up. Give up."
"Not good enough. Give Up"
A familiar internal dialogue, non? Without question, in the emotional roller-coaster life of an artist, so much is won or lost in the daily head game, which is why the Close approach started out as a corrective to this pathos, simply as a way to keep working, to keep the ball rolling. Instead of saying to yourself, "where am I going to start?" with Close's method the answer was never an open one. It was always clear and affirmative in nature, a positive building off of whatever he had. Sure, there is no tidal waves of inspiration, no intoxicating rushes of insight. But he felt the productive tradeoff was well worth it. Close claims he cares more about his work now because of this, and I believe him. Many creativity experts praise daily structure and practice, like the well known "Morning Pages" technique of Julia Cameron's The Artists Way. I consider blogging a form practice as well, a place to build courage and a voice for future writing projects.
I made another connection when writing this as well, the lure of colours again refocusing my attention like a child fixated on a shiny new object placed in front of her. I recalled the first time I saw a mandela or sand painting (not Nelson) being created. I saw the Tibetan form (there is a Native American form as well) on a chance occasion while touring the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in the early 1990s as a university student. I vividly recall seeing the work, almost completed, from a vertical vantage point, peering down several flours into the wide base of the Rotunda, where several Safron-coloured monks were sedately but purposefully working their magic with brightly coloured sands, their beautiful creation an emergent property in our midst. I quickly learned that creating a mandela was a spiritual meditative practice that uses mystic circle designs or cosmograms. That each work is a like a prayer. But as life is inherently transient and fleeting, so too is a work of art. And this is why when the mandela is finished it's destroyed, simply swept up into a paper bag and taken back to Tibet; like ashes from a funeral pyre, the sands are released into one of their sacred rivers with a ceremony. I found this so poignant, so strange, so counter-intuitive, inconceivably difficult, and clearly something I could never fathom doing, being the impatient, egoist westerner, the Chuck-Close person that I am. But perhaps Close has found a middle way with his approach and common sense discipline? Perhaps the gap between the admirable detachment of the monks and me is not that wide? In any event, I'm glad Close is well west on the cultural compass. It would be hard to peer into his fascinating faces if they were swept away by a fast-moving stream.
