Oral history interview with Chuck Close, 1987 May 14-September 30 Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Chuck Close on May 14, 1987. The interview took place at the artist's studio on 75 Spring Street, New York City, and was conducted by Judd Tully for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interview JUDD TULLY: According to published information, you were born in the state of Washington in 1940. What was your actual birthdate and tell me a little bit about Monroe, Washington? CHUCK CLOSE: July 5, 1940. Monroe, Washington, was a smelly little town halfway up the Cascade Mountains, northeast of Seattle. I didn't live there very long, actually. I was born at home -- not in a hospital -- of humble beginnings. Actually, I want to go back and photograph the house, because if I were a politician it would be great to have a picture of the shack that I was born in. [They laugh.] MR. TULLY: Was it really a shack? MR. CLOSE: Well, it wasn't a real shack, but it was a very modest little cottage. "Cottage" is giving it all the benefit of the doubt. It was definitely on the wrong side of the tracks -- about thirty five feet from the tracks. My father at the time was a sheet metal man and was also working in a hardware store. He was sort of an itinerant inventor, a jack of all trades. Probably basically unemployable. He had a lot of skills and seemed to -- coming out of the Depression -- had just had a whole string of handyman kind of jobs. My mother was a trained pianist, but the Depression pretty much screwed up her chances of any kind of a career, although she did teach piano at home. MR. TULLY: So what were their names? MR. CLOSE: My father was Leslie Durward Close and my mother was Mildred Wagner Close. MR. TULLY: About how old were your parents when you were born? MR. CLOSE: My father was born in 1903 so in 1940 he would have been 37. My mother was 10 years younger so she was 27. I was an only child. I recently found out that my father had been previously married and had another child, but I didn't find that out until I was 40 years old. MR. TULLY: How did that come up? MR. CLOSE: I got a call on the phone. My mother never told me. Even on her deathbed she never told me. MR. TULLY: She obviously knew? MR. CLOSE: Yes. It's strange. I guess there was tremendous embarrassment about all that stuff. My aunt claims that my father didn't really think the child was his, and married her because it was a small town and somebody had to or something like that. But I don't know. I've since met the man. He says he's my half brother and I assume he is. But I was raised my whole life as an only child and my mother was an only child and my father was virtually an only child. He had a half brother who was much older. So it's like a lot of solitary souls. MR. TULLY: And you said you weren't there very long in Monroe? MR. CLOSE: No. I think when I was just a year or so old we moved to Everett, Washington, which is an even smellier town. It's on the bay. It's a poor, whitetrash mill town. It is the smelliest city in the world, I think. It was all paper mills with that process where they break down the wood and it produces an incredible smell. I lived there until I was in the first grade and we moved to Carmel. My father started working for the Army Air Corps. First he worked in the air force base in Everett, and then was transferred to one in Tacoma, so we moved there. I stayed there until he died when I was 11. MR. TULLY: So he died very young. MR. CLOSE: He was 47 when he died -- almost 48. My mother and I moved back to Everett. My grandparents were living in the house that I had grown up in and then we bought the house next door to them, so my grandparents could help take care of me. My mother who had never worked -- other than teach piano -- had to go to work. MR. TULLY: So by that time when you moved back you were -- MR. CLOSE: I guess I was 12 when we moved back. MR. TULLY: I meant to ask you before -- you were Charles? MR. CLOSE: Yes. There were only a few names in my family. People were not too inventive. Everybody was Charles Thomas or Thomas Charles or whatever -- my grandfather was Charles -- so all the names were taken. I was little Charlie. There was Big Charlie and Little Charlie. To my relatives I'm always still Charles, although I have only one relative left. I guess it was some attempt at individuation that in high school I started to go by Chuck. I always hated the name. But it's a total accident that Chuck is my professional name. I didn't intend that to happen which, skipping ahead, but it's anecdotal. Everybody knew me as Chuck, but I had intended to use Charles as a more formal name. Very early in my career Cindy Nemser did an interview which was used in ArtForum. Actually she did two. She did an article for Art in America which says, "Introducing Charles Close," she titled that. Then in the interview she didn't title it and it just said "Chuck Close" and "CM." The photographer, who was a student of mine, took the photographs for ArtForum and he'd just written "Chuck Close" on the envelope, so it went down as an interview with Chuck Close. I don't know if a similar thing happened with Red Grooms or not, but the whole kind of informality of it was not -- I regret it. Hardly a day goes by that I don't regret having that as my professional name. MR. TULLY: When did this ArtForum piece and Art in America piece come out? MR. CLOSE: That must have been about 1968 or 1969, I guess. MR. TULLY: So when you said one of your students you were teaching-- MR. CLOSE: I was teaching at the School of Visual Arts. MR. TULLY: Okay. MR. CLOSE: Now do you want to go back to the early years? MR. TULLY: Yes. You had moved back to Everett. You were living at home with your mother and she was working and your grandparents were next door. What was the school atmosphere like? What was going on around then? MR. CLOSE: Now I realize -- or I found out later in life--that I am dyslexic. In the '40s and '50s of course nobody knew from or gave a shit about something like that, so I had a lot of difficulty in school. I don't have a typical kind of learning disability. Although I did just find a drawing that I made when I must have been about three or four -- I was already writing, so I was probably around four -- in which I wrote my name all in mirror writing so probably there were indications that now somebody would see immediately as an indication of something, but at the time it didn't. I still can write mirror writing as fast as I can write forward. I can write backwards and upside down as fast as I can write forward. MR. TULLY: That sounds quite something. And then you can read it also as easily? MR. CLOSE: Yes. And, also, making prints was very easy for me. I immediately have no trouble imaging what something looks like the other way. I did a self-portrait etching a while ago in which it was reversed -- of course -- and it was a negative because the bright copper plate had a dark ground. As I was sketching the lines they were going to be black and I was white, so in a sense I made the equivalent of a photographic negative reversed and negative. Everyone seemed to think that was kind of amazing that I could do it and it seemed not at all a difficult problem to me. [Laughs.] But at any rate, one of the characteristics of the kind of learning disability I have is a problem with facial recognition. Everyone I've ever seen or people I look at all look immediately familiar to me, but I have tremendous difficulty figuring out who it is and where I've seen them before. I never can memorize. To memorize something was unbelievably complicated and I developed my own systems to be able to remember which are now are very similar to the kinds of things that they try to teach learning-disabled children. It's something I evolved on my own, which I guess is probably the basis for--I'm sure I'm not the only person to have evolved systems like this. These systems have probably become the basis for how to teach other people.