Study for "Kent"

In the mid-1960s, Chuck Close abandoned his earlier abstract painting style for one more photo-based. In 1968, he began using passport-style images of himself, family, and friends to create colossal portrait heads that appear dispassionate and meticulously detailed even as they dissolve into quasi-pointillist painted areas when seen at close range.

To start, Close overlaid a photograph with a grid and then transferred the image to canvas, square by square. Originally working only in black and white, he turned to color in 1970, limiting himself to the three primary colors, which he mixed together on the work's surface. His process was borrowed from commercial printing in which colors are produced by superimposing layers of transparent color. A transparency of red, blue, and yellow color separations would be made of the original photograph, with dye-transfer sheets produced from those in various combinations. Close used these as a guide in the coloring of the final work, which would be created with the use of numerous working drawings; the AMAM's Study is just one of several drawings for the final, monumental painting Kent (100 × 90 in.; Art Gallery of Ontario). In Oberlin's example, the three colors are shown separately at lower left, with twelve combinations in the same row. The transparent medium of watercolor allows the colors to be overlaid, rather than overtly mixed.

In 1970, the year of this work, Close had one of his earliest exhibitions, Three Young Americans, at the AMAM, along with Ron Cooper and Neil Jenney. Such exhibitions of the work of emerging American artists were prevalent at Oberlin in the late 1950s, '60s, and '70s.