Chuck Close

When we see a painting hanging on the hallowed walls of a museum, we get a sense of an artist’s technique and imagination, but we don’t get a sense of the process and hurdles that artist faced on the way to critical acclaim. What goes on behind the scenes, or behind the canvas? How does a starving artist becoming a financially secure cultural icon?

Jessica Harris speaks with one such artist, Chuck Close. Chuck is considered one of the leading contemporary painters of the 20th and 21st century. His works hang in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Walker Museum in Minneapolis, and the National Gallery in Washington DC, just to name a few.

Many of us are familiar with his work, but this show makes us more familiar with his life, as he tells us how he built a successful art career, from scratch.