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JUNE 2007

Artist Chuck Close Triumphs Over Learning Disabilities

By Emily Sherwood, Ph.D.

“I’ve found a way to turn lemons into lemonade,” said award-winning artist Chuck Close from his motorized wheelchair during a recent NYU Child Study Center-sponsored lecture at the Upper East Side Spence School. Dr. Harold Koplewicz, M.D., Founder and Director,  NYU Child Study Center and the Arnold and Debbie Simon Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, conducted an informal and informative interview.

The internationally celebrated painter, printmaker, and photographer—famous for his wall-size, “photo-realistic” paintings, many of them lifelike representations of human faces that, when viewed closely, are actually comprised of multiple, grid-like geometric shapes—has struggled against adversity for most of his life. Diagnosed with a learning disability at the age of four (“my memory is like a pocket with a hole in it,” he chuckled to a packed audience who had come to hear him talk about living with a learning disability), at 49 Close was afflicted with a spinal blood clot that left him unable to use his body from the neck down. “You’re either a survivor or you’re not. You’re either an optimist or a pessimist,” concluded Close philosophically, adding, “I just find a way to make it all work.”

Close reflects a rare ability to transcend misfortune and turn it into a unique, almost strategic, advantage. Although neuromuscular problems seriously compromised his athletic abilities as a child, Close performed puppet acts and magic shows to attract neighbors and peers to his orbit. “I became the circle around which people radiated,” he explained. His father bought him an easel for his fifth birthday, stimulating a burgeoning talent in art that ultimately trumped his struggles to read and write. “Art saved my life,” noted Close, who, following college at the University of Washington and graduate study at Yale, immediately received prestigious invitations for his early art works from important New York galleries and international exhibitions. Close was blessed with a nearly photographic ability to “devour an image and deconstruct it;” when tested later in life, he floored the psychologist by rotating disparate jigsaw puzzle pieces and reassembling them perfectly from left to right and top to bottom. But most importantly, art “made me feel good about myself. You just need to find something where you can come out the other end feeling confident, feeling skilled, and feeling good about yourself,” he added.

Even after his paralysis in 1989, Close compensated for physical adversity with courage and ingenuity. He discovered that he could return to pain
ting by holding the paintbrush between his teeth and ultimately by strapping it to his hand. Ironically, many critics believe that since his physical disability, Close’s paintings, which can take up to a year to produce and sell for a steep price, are even better than before: “A ravaged artist has become in a miracle, one of the great colorists and brush wielders of his time,” exuded Roger Angell in The New Yorker.

Yet for all its inspiration, Close’s motivational story flies in the face of current educational practice. “I’m not sure that the route that we take people through education is particularly effective,” he castigated, noting that by requiring students to take prerequisites before progressing to higher order skills, schools are “putting enough roadblocks in the way that [students] are actually discouraged before they even get going.” Close himself never took algebra, geometry, physics or chemistry because he couldn’t get beyond arithmetic, yet he can talk conceptually with higher level mathematicians: “If I could have gotten beyond arithmetic, I could have really enjoyed math,” he added with a sigh of frustration for a system that too often fails to recognize different kinds of intelligence. “Einstein couldn’t balance his checkbook,” he concluded pointedly, adding, “Life is on-the-job training.”

As a case in point, Close described how some people think his work, in its grid-like precision, must surely be mathematically derived. Not so, stated Close emphatically. Indeed, even his father-in-law, an engineer, tried unsuccessfully to quantify his artistic formulas. “[My art] is found, it’s felt, it’s arrived at, and it’s not some mathematical overlay,” explained Close. “So who needs [math]? I don’t need it. I never need any of those skills,” he laughed, to the roaring applause of the audience. Close—artist, husband, father, and inspiration to so many—yet again commanded center stage as attendees circled around him for another dose of wisdom and hope.#

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