A Portrait of the Portrait Artist

Posted Nov 30, 2005 by Kevin Walker

Updated Nov 30, 2005 at 03:28 PM

Chuck Close, by his own admission, didn’t really consider himself a practitioner of portraits. “It took me decades to admit that I was making portraits. It’s very hard, when you’re inoculated with the modernist virus,” Close says in the introduction to , Close Reading: Chuck Close and the Artist Portrait, which offers hundreds of pages about Close and many examples of his work, most of them portraits of himself or artist friends. Not being a visual artist critic, I struggle to find the words to describe his work, but for reasons I can’t therefore describe, I find it riveting. This is probably not the least bit helpful, so I urge you to see it for yourself, if this sort of thing interests you.

On a completely different note, because I like to strike as many notes as possible, the Smithsonian Institute has released The Story of Science, Book Two: Newton At The Center (the first in the series concentrated on Aristotle). Author Joy Hakim delves into the revival of scientific inquiry in the days following the Middle Ages (there’s a really good point in that for the science vs. religion debates, but I leave that to you, gentle reader). Some of the advancements Hakim explores include Newton’s work on gravity and Volta and Maxwell’s work in electricity.

Art. Science. How about Asian Culture? Patricia Yeo and Tom Steele offer up a heaping helping in Everyday Asian, which includes 120 “mouthwatering recipes” from Asia. Of course, there are far more days in the year than 120, so this is really just four months worth of “every day,” but why quibble with a book that provides you a recipe for grilled sea scallops with pickled shallots and green mango?