Re-reading an old favorite - Chuck Close

A long time ago I bought a book called 'Close Portraits' that was published in 1980 by Walker Art Center in Minneapolis about the art of US painter Chuck Close. I was always fascinated by the huge photorealistic portraits that Close did of photographs of his subjects. I keep coming back to the book, flipping through the catalogue of his works. When the rest of the art world was busy with abstract expressionism Close developed his own, unique style of hyperrealistic, huge paintings.

One of his paintings is titled 'Phil', first painted in 1969, and I've looked at the picture of it I don't know how many times until tonight when I read that 'Phil' is actually Philip Glass, one of my favourite composers. You either love Philip Glass's music or you hate it - nothing in between. 'Phil' is more than 2.7m tall by 2.1m wide. Wonderful scale!

I liked the book's description of Glass's music (which is taken from Robert Rosenblum's 'Notes on Sol LeWitt', Sol LeWitt, ed. Alicia Legg, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1978, p 20.) '... Glass's music is composed of what at first may seem monotonous, repetitive tones, electronically amplified in a way that nearly conceals personal style. Yet the experience becomes a kind of slow immersion in a sonic sea, where the structural anchors of the score tend to be washed away by the mounting sensuous force of the cumulative sound.' Yeah, I was about to say that!

And to think of the number of times that I have looked at the page in the book with 'Phil' on one page, and those words on the other. Maybe I only bought it for the pictures...