Chuck Close

Chuck Close is a  American artist noted for his highly inventive techniques used to paint the human face. He is best known for his large-scale Photo-realist portraits. Close began taking art lessons as a child and at age 14 saw an exhibition of Jackson Pollock’s abstract paintings, which helped inspire him to become a painter. He studied at the University of Washington School of Art (B.A., 1962) and at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture (B.F.A., 1963; M.F.A., 1964), and in 1964 he won a Fulbright scholarship to study in Vienna. While teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1965–67), he gradually rejected the elements of Abstract Expressionism that had initially characterized his work.