The great American artist Chuck Close has sadly died at the age of 81. Our dear friends, David and Laurie Adamson, collaborated with Close for many decades. In 2007, David and Laurie's Adamson Gallery in Washington, DC presented the "Chuck Close Tapestries" exhibition, which was our first introduction to the magnificent "Kate Moss" Jacquard Tapestry, a reprise of Close's 2003 daguerreotype.
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| "Chuck Close Tapestries", Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC, 2007 |
Artist’s portrait of Kate Moss dazzles
There is no substitute for experiencing Close's Kate in person.
Close goes above and beyond the challenge of making us see Moss as we've never seen her, without resorting to gimmicks. He does so by bringing something both old and new to portraiture. Moss is shot straight-on, head-and-shoulders against a black background in a 19th-century daguerrotype image.
But instead of printing the image on paper, Close translates it using digital weaving techniques to create a 103-by-79-inch jacquard tapestry made up of 17,800 threads. [Ed: The tapestry, edition of 10, was woven in Belgium by the Magnolia Tapestry Project.]
The combination of scale and texture, along with the image's mix of crisply detailed and blurry areas, gives Kate a palpability that stops you in your tracks. Once you've caught your breath and moved closer, you get lost in the subtleties of woven light and shadow.
Stand back again, and your attention returns to Moss, whom Close has apparently shot without makeup, zits and all. She's haunting and radiant. If you've never understood fashion photographers' obsession with her, you do now.
The tapestry floats like a classic Mark Rothko painting, but it's grown out of Close's decades of transposing photographic portraits to paintings, using grids to take images apart and then reconstruct them. The fact that this time the reconstruction happened by digital methods rather than by hand doesn't leave the viewer cold — just the opposite. Close's tapestry portrait of Moss feels at least as intimate as anything he's done on canvas. This is what a deep engagement with portraiture looks like. — Douglas Britt, Houston Chronicle, 2008
To our delight and amazement, friends Dan Snyder and Tom Breit bought the Kate tapestry and proudly hung the artwork in several of his Washington DC homes from 2007 – 2012.
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| Cleveland Park, Washington DC, 2007 |
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| Embassy Row, Washington, DC, 2011 |
In 2011, the tapestry was featured in the prestigious "Capital Portraits" exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.
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| "Capitol Portraits" Exhibition Reception, National Portrait Gallery, 2011 |
In 2012, we acquired the beautiful Kate tapestry and happily hung her in our newly-built home in Sarasota, Florida where she has resided ever since. Our one brief, but exciting, in-person encounter with Chuck Close was in May 2017 at the Children's Health Fund annual benefit dinner at Cipriani 42nd Street in New York City.
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| Kate unfurled, 2012 |
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| Tom and Nhan helped Elliott hang the tapestry with care |
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| Kate Tapestry, J+E Home, Lido Shores, Sarasota, FL |
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| 'No. 3 of 10' label by The Magnolia Tapestry Project |
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| Janet and Chuck Close, New York City, 2017 |
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