Artist, Chuck Close: This piece is made by spraying ink mixed with acrylic through an airbrush into the spaces of the grid. And the title refers to the fact that it's 104,072 squares. To make a piece like this, which took 14 months, I spent a long time up on a ladder. Each dot is hit an average of ten times, ten little puffs on the airbrush. So, it's a 1,400,000 little presses with my finger on the airbrush, until I developed arthritis.
Robert is Robert Ellson, a friend of my wife's from junior high school, who ended up in Wall Street. From the very beginning, I wanted to make portraits of everyman, everywoman. I asked my friends, because nobody knew who they were and they were anonymous.
All my work is made from photographs and I take the photographs myself. There is no projection involved. I look at something small and I make something big.
The real desire on my part with working this way is that I wanted to get away from virtuoso art marks. I was a very good student and I could make stuff that looked like art, but it always looked like someone else's art. And so the idea of simply spraying a little fuzzy mark into each square appealed to me.
I wanted to make a big, aggressive, confrontational image that you could see from across the gallery. And then I wanted to suck people up into the kind of middle distance, in which they’d have trouble seeing it as a whole, almost like Gulliver's Lilliputians crawling across the surface of a face, not knowing that they're stumbling on a beard hair, and falling into a nostril. And then I want to suck the viewer right up to the surface, for the really intimate experience, more information than you ever wanted to know about someone's face.