The scrutiny of a face over the course of eleven months gives rise to intimacy. This portrait is presented without the artist’s usual static of color. It’s still monumental, still arresting in black and white, unmistakably Close. It invites the viewer to inspect the making of the marks—thousands of his fingerprints, whorls intact. It’s grown-up finger painting. What is legible, transferable? There’s a tension between the delivery and the likeness. It involves the necessary distance of analysis to disassemble her features and then reconstruct them. Was there ever any tenderness? Memory is impressionistic and that comes through the work. She was the wife of a fellow artist. She sat for the photograph. He captured her sadness. Was she pleased with the results? Given the artist’s troubled history, I doubt her feelings factored in.

*Publisher’s Note:

Marta/Fingerprint (carbon transfer and direct gravure etching, 1986) by Chuck Close (1940–2021), American painter and photographer who’s best known as a Photorealist artist, is held by the Asheville Art Museum. Etching was on exhibit in March 2024 when the poet visited the museum:
https://collection.ashevilleart.org/objects-1/info/2720?sort=0

Detailed profile and additional artworks by Chuck Close are available at Pace Gallery and Pace Publications (which printed Marta/Fingerprint):
https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/chuck-close/

See also this article published by his Alma Mater: “Art and Resilience” (Chuck Close, the 1997 UW Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus, survived a spinal blood clot to paint again.) by Jon Marmor in University of Washington Magazine (June 1997):
https://magazine.washington.edu/feature/chuck-close-overcame-struggles-to-become-a-renowned-artist/

Links were retrieved on 7 April 2025.

Cherie Hunter Day

is a recent transplant to New Hampshire. Her micro-prose and prose poems have appeared in 100 Word Story, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Mackinaw, Mid-American Review, Moon City Review, and Unbroken. Her latest collection, A House Meant Only for Summer (Red Moon Press, 2023), features haibun and tanka prose. When not writing or making collages, she’s outside exploring the woods and avoiding ticks.