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 painting 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.#
