Steidlville

“I’ve always loved pulling something apart to understand its basic component parts and then seeing how they go together and how they build.” (Chuck Close)
Chuck Close’s scribble self-portrait grew from a desire to see his own drawing process unfold step by step. Utilizing a soft-ground etching technique, Close isolates each of the nine stages of his developing self-portrait. Working in only one color at a time, he scribbles in magenta, cyan, yellow, orange, pink, green, red, turquoise, and then black until he is satisfied with the emerging image. To best examine his process, Close arranged his developing labors into two volumes: first into a series of nine plate proofs that show the separate stages of his drawing and then into a series of nine progressive proofs that show the cumulative effect as he adds each new color. “I don’t think that most people have the slightest idea how a work of art gets made. If I demystify the process so that people can see that this happened and then that happened, they can get in sync with it and can sort of figure it out. Not that I want to destroy the magic. I still want to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but after I pull it out of the hat, I’m perfectly happy to go back and show you how I did it. And I don’t think that destroys the magic at all.”