The Pulitzer: Keith on "Keith"

As I wrote in a previous post, our upcoming web catalogue for the Portrait exhibition will feature lots of interesting juxtapositions between the artist's works, the artist's thoughts on the subject, the subject's thoughts on the artist, and so on.  Our director, Matthias, had the pleasure of talking to Keith Hollingworth about the portrait Chuck Close did of him.  Keith wrote a text about the experience for our web catalogue and it's a definite highlight.  Here's the portrait in our galleries:

And here's the first part of Keith's comments (I'm not going to post it in its entirety--you'll have to wait for the launch of the catalogue for that):

"Chuck and I had been friends for some time when he approached me and asked if I would be one of his "mug shots," as he then called them. A series of shots was taken by my brother Wayne, who worked as a professional photographer at the time. Chuck was amazed about the images being so consistent. The explanation is simple: as I have a facial paralysis, I preferred to just hold my face and avoid the risk of showing an asymmetrical expression. That was the sitting. Then, a grid system was applied to a 16 x 18 inch photograph to blow the image up. It was hard for me to look at the finished work. But this was mainly because of my facial paralysis, as I hadn't come to terms with it. In the long run, it was also difficult to understand that "Keith" and I had become two completely separate entities." -- Keith Hollingworth

(Rachel)