Skip to main content

Notes on Chuck Close in Rome

A page from Henri Cole’s 1995-96 notebook

In 1995, the poet Henri Cole traveled to Italy as the recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature. While there, he spent time with the American painter and photographer Chuck Close, who died last week, aged eighty-one. Recently, Cole came across a notebook in which he had recorded his impressions.

I’ve just come from a little opening up on the fourth floor, and while the pastel landscapes were fine to look at, most remarkable was a brief conversation I had with the painter Chuck Close, who suddenly began speaking quite openly about his ailment or condition, the result, I believe, of a blood clot in his spine. He said he’s been in his present state for seven years, and that he only feels heat from his shoulders up. Pointing to his scalp, he said the only place he can perspire is through a small patch of skin on the left side of his head. When he is touched anywhere below his shoulders, what he feels is an icy cold. He is happiest in the sun in his bathing suit.

When he paints, he straps his brushes to his wrists. It is easier for him to paint than to draw, because he can paint with his arm out before him; to draw requires more mobility than he has. He talked with such candor that a small group of us was drawn to him. When a child toddled by and stared at him, he said children were always curious about him because they couldn’t understand why he was in a stroller. He said it was strange not to feel what he knows he’s supposed to feel, and then he asked me to touch his hand. His definition of pain has changed completely, he told me, since almost everything he feels is pain.  If there is a blessing in his condition, it is that it is not degenerative. It is hard to object to his smoking and drinking, seeing the pleasure he takes in them.

He said he was not a believer in the “adversity makes the artist stronger” theory, though it does seem that he is living proof of this. He said that when he started off painting, all his works were De Koonings. Later, once he’d developed his own style, he was able to return to the De Kooning palette, which he loves. He said that he was always subtly altering the variables in his paintings so that they’d evolve in some modest way. He said he did not prefer one or the other sort of artist; that is, one who was constantly remaking himself as opposed to one who was not. When I said that I did not really think of myself narrowly as a “gay poet,” he said he understood completely, because though he is a photorealist painter, he does not admire the work of other photorealists and believes this connection to be superficial.

***

He invited me to visit him in his studio overlooking Trastevere and when I arrived there was a violent rainstorm blowing water through the oversize windows. A big puddle grew at our feet. He sat in an armchair and spoke of the grid painting of his daughter, Maggie, in process on his easel. He said that painting the small grid squares was like playing golf and that each hole was about a par four or five, meaning that he usually needed to return that often with his brush to each grid to get it right. Of course, I thought of James Merrill calling poetry word golf—“in three lucky strokes of word golf LEAD/ Once again turns (LOAD, GOAD) to GOLD.”  Chuck also used the analogy of archeology, of digging deeper and deeper until the thing he sought emerged from the paint. When I suggested that his method of composition was rather like a poet’s—which is to say cumulative, word by word, line by line—he said he always felt he had more in common with writers than painters. And, indeed, his canvas was aslant on the easel, like a sheet of paper on a desk.

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Blizzard, and a memoir, Orphic Paris. A selected sonnets is forthcoming.

Works by Chuck Close appeared in Issue no. 75 (Spring 1979) and Issue no. 207 (Winter 2013) of the Review.



from The Paris Review https://ift.tt/3jnziBf
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Rejection Plot

Print from Trouble , by Bruce Charlesworth, a portfolio which appeared in The Paris Review in the magazine’s Fall 1985 issue. Rejection may be universal, but as plots go, it’s second-rate—all buildup and no closure, an inherent letdown. Stories are usually defined by progress: the development of events toward their conclusions, characters toward their fates, questions toward understanding, themes toward fulfillment. But unlike marriage, murder, and war, rejection offers no obstacles to surmount, milestones to mark, rituals to observe. If a plot point is a shift in a state of affairs—the meeting of a long-lost twin, the fateful red stain on a handkerchief—rejection offers none; what was true before is true after. Nothing happens, no one is materially harmed, and the rejected party loses nothing but the cherished prospect of something they never had to begin with. If the romance plot sets up an enticing question—Will they or won’t they? — the rejection plot spoils everything upfront:...
Post a Comment
Read more