Seattle and Raleigh-Durham marketing, graphic and brand design studio Design Kompany

Design Kompany took its second field trip to Tacoma ever to check out the Tacoma Art Museum’s exhibit of Chuck Close… um, tapestries.

We’re working on a total rebrand for a company that’s 110% open to our creative input (dream job!). So we’ve been investigating a million typefaces to see what could be a good match.

So it’s no surprise that half the time we were at Tacoma Art Museum, Akira, a groupie of Helvetica the movie, was conspicuously scrutinizing this one:

I noticed one of the museum people noticing him checking out all angles of the gallery wall’s raised letterforms and mumbling something to himself.

“He’s really into typefaces,” I said.

Leaving Akira to muse over this, I zoomed ahead to Renoir and some woodblock prints and on to the section of large (these are big pieces of artwork for anyone who’s not familiar) Chuck Close stuff.

And I loved it.

I got reminded that I need to write up this whole experience of seeing Close’s paintings because on Wednesday I was at Seattle U for a lecture about how to make sales and instantly spotted a Chuck Close print in the student center cafeteria.

You might remember I mentioned Chuck Close before in this Desknotes blog.

At that time, I was making a self-portrait kind of inspired by his style of intense portraiture. Those photographs of people are just so dead-pan.

My drawng was a small-scale project, simply graphite on paper made in the course of an afternoon. Something that took a lot longer happened in college—I once made a John Coltrane one that was pretty huge out of ink and paper. This was the kind of image made from thumbprints pressed to paper, in a manner Chuck Close used to do.

This was at a time when I was in art school in Brooklyn and riding my bike twice a week across the Brooklyn Bridge to sell jazz records in the West Village.

But getting back to Close. Talk about a master of color value. Anyone who is super perceptive on shades of gray would appreciate this. I am thinking specifically of people like neurologist Oliver Sacks’ patient, a colorblind painter.

New and now

What I noticed is that Close is really doing some new things these days in the way of collaborations.

He’s finding people who happen to know people who have the connections to get things going in new directions. Interesting tack.

For the subjects of his work, he’s using the same images I’ve seen in past exhibitions. Mixed with some new ones, too, of course. But think about it. The same people. Still doing portraits. Yet instead of seeing his work as photographs or paintings like I did in New York and Minneapolis, this time, threads of color were woven to make an image.

Aptly, the show is called ‘A Couple of Ways of Doing Something.’

It’s showing at Tacoma Art Museum through June 15. Definitely worth a jaunt down to what locals call “T-Town.” We got to meet up with the talents at Rusty George’s creative studio and take five at our new outpost Blackwater cafe on Design Kompany’s other field trip to Tacoma.

Chuck Close
‘A Couple of Ways of Doing Something’
Through June 15
Tacoma Art Museum
TacomaArtMuseum.Org/…