Installation is 9’ x 9’
oil on canvas, 2005
Who doesn't like Chuck Close? I love him! So, I decided to make paintings of his 1968 self-portrait. Why? Because it provided a stable subject matter with which I could create idiosyncratic adaptations. Conceived in mirror-image pairs, each twin adaptation provided me with two opportunities to try a particular kind of painting application. For me, painting comes down to the tension between image and material: so, painting Chuck Close's painting meant I not only got to paint his face, which I find sexy, and to repaint his 1968 self portrait, thus transforming it into a portrait, but I also got to paint , i.e. to muck about with materials, seeing how far I could play with representation within the intrinsic abstractness of painting.
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