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Art in adversity

Chuck Close knew he wanted to be an artist at the age of four. And his drawings from that time, just as tellingly, show the signs of what would plague him on that journey. He wrote in "mirror writing", writing just as fast backwards or upside down as he could forwards. This undiagnosed dyslexia would inspire his later, celebrated, back-to-front paintings styled like negatives.

Yet for a young boy trying to succeed at school, it presented immense difficulties. As well as having difficulties placing faces he recognised, Close had great trouble memorising facts. The night before an exam, he would sit in a hot bath, with no other light aside from the lamp that shone on his book, and go over and over the information. To commit words to memory, he would break them down into letters and create sentences with each letter. In the exam, he could work out the letters, rebuild the word, and answer the question.

On a daily basis, he couldn't prove that he was paying attention by reeling off facts and figures, so Close used the one thing that came easily to him: art. "Art really saved my life because art is how I proved that I wasn't a malingerer."

Meanwhile, a neurological condition meant he couldn't run more than 30ft before his legs would lock. Close's father died, at the age of 47, when Close was 11. The same year, Close contracted a kidney disease, nephritis, and had to stay in bed for nine months. Yet despite the set back of being a year behind his contemporaries — and at the mercy of a teacher who actively discouraged him in his pursuit of academia — Close continued to strive.

By the time he transferred to the University of Washington, he had the highest academic average of his year. He graduated from Yale Graduate School with an MFA in 1964. Still, he wore his early experiences heavily. "I still had this image of myself as a failure and not an academic," he admitted years later.

After travelling in Europe, and a stint of teaching, Close moved to New York in 1967 with his girlfriend, Leslie Rose — who he married that year — and began working on portraits: a deeply unfashionable subject at the time. He painted friends and family from photographs, captivated by the idea of working from a still image. "The photograph," he says, "gives me an opportunity to have a poem-like frozen moment of time."

His photorealist approach, achieved by painting on grids of small squares, provoked controversy. He was spat on in the street, and had bottles thrown at him. "When I was coming up in the Sixties there was this schism between what people called "eyeball realists" and people working with photographs," he explains. "I was the Antichrist as far as those people were concerned."

Close had faced worse than art critics. His career took flight in 1973 with his first exhibition in New York's museum of modern art where he showed the now famous Keith, and he moved from strength to strength. Until December 1988, that is, when close calls "the event" occurred: in a few short hours, from nowhere, a spinal column blood clot paralysed him.

Officially diagnosed as an "incomplete quadriplegic", he required months in rehab just to regain some movement. He was told that his career as an artist had come to an end. Chuck Close didn't agree. Wheelchair-reliant, he was back in the studio soon after he was discharged, painting with brushes strapped to his wrists. And while the technique has not changed — huge grids, painstaking detail — his choice of hue has: there are blazes of colour across his work now. This is testament, he says, to the unadulterated joy and relief of knowing he can still paint.

Twenty years later, he is still producing art, and still feted by the critics for his experimental techniques. He continues to battle against the bulwarks that present themselves, but his work — square by square — is an insight into his dogged creativity.