Chuck Close inspired Fingerprint Portraits

Blind students use hot glue lines and their finger prints to fill in the value for their portraits

There's more than one way to build value on a drawing. Graphite and charcoal are the popular ways to draw value, but why not follow the example of a young Chuck Close and use fingerprints. 

Studying Chuck Close is especially meaningful to my students because he is an example of someone who never let disabilities get in the way of making Art. When Edgar Degas and Georgia O'Keefe lost their sight, they just changed their medium. Chuck Close turned to Art when his learning disabilities kept him from exeling academically. He tackled his Face Blindness head on, by actually painting the heads of people he knew to flatten them out make them more recognizable. When he became paralyzed, he strapped a brush to his hand with a velcro brace. He stopped climbing ladders, and instead inserted a slit into his studio so that the canvas could be lowered into the floor for him to reach all parts of the canvas from his wheel chair. his hyper realistic style changed, to something more colorful and abstract, but it was still quality representational art, that allowed him to be Clinton's Presidential Portrait artist. After watching a PBS video of him telling his life story while completing a self portrait over the course of the month, we made our own fingerprint portraits in his early style. All you need is an inkpad and a piece of paper. It helps to have a black and white photo to trace and replicate the value. Start with the darkest parts and then as the ink lightens move to some lighter areas before dabbing the ink pad again for dark ink. The biggest issue I saw, was students going directly from the ink to a light area and making a dark mark. It can't be erased. With that warning, try this project on your own and see what you come up with!

I also showed this video of Chuck Close writing a note to his younger self. He died three years ago, but the advice he gave to never let anyone define what you are capable of. "Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us show up and work," he explained. And he teaches you don't have to invent the wheel every day. You just keep doing what your doing and you'll eventually get somewhere. After seeing this, a few students wrote a letter to their younger selves, and I did too. It's a powerful exercise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxR3ELuZjLw

Close One: Chuck Close Painting Assignment

A Ray Charles Portrait gave students a chance to practice

Last summer I enjoyed seeing Chuck Close's paintings in the National Portrait Gallery, which is when I decided that this would be the year to have my students learn to paint in his style. I love introducing my students to artists, who have been successful despite having disabilities, to show them that they can overcome their own challenges.  For most of my adult life, Chuck Close has been an example of someone who has made millions of dollars doing his larger-than-life portraits, while confined to a wheel chair. It wasn't until the last several years, however, that I realized that he has has also had to deal face blindness and learning disabilities.  All of my students have a visual impairment and most of them are also learning disabled, so it is no surprise that they had fun learning about Close and his work.

For this project, students chose someone they wanted to paint: a football player, singer, mother, nephew, girlfriend, and friend were all in the mix. Some students choose to do a self portrait.  We "cheated" by projecting images of each chosen person and tracing them onto a piece of paper.  This isn't too far to the way of Chuck Close, who has been accused of cheating by working from gridded photographs.  Who cares?  There's evidence that even Vermeer used a camera obscura, and Leonardo would have been all over using smart phones if he had been given access to them. Tools are meant to be used. 

A grid was placed on top of the drawing and I hot glued all the lines for my students who were totally blind. I also helped mix paint for those students.

Most students laid in all the squares of color first, paying attention to the value shifts, so that shapes/ facial features could be differentiated.  Then circles of contrasting colors were placed in each square, like targets of skin and hair tones. There is usually a moment in which students say they hate their painting before working through it and coming to love it.  You'd think they'd learn to trust me by now when I tell them that it gets darkest before the dawn in art making. During our end-of-semester portfolio critique, many students choose this as their favorite project. So there were many lessons that came out of this lesson plan:  value and color, repetition and unity, patience and grit, and that your disabilities aren't necessarily liabilities. 

Our Student Exhibition contained several of the Chuck Close style Portraits