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that made him poor at sports and even the most rudimentary playground games. The teachers probably thought so because he tested poorly, seemed lazy, and rarely finished his exams. It turned out later that he was dyslexic, but the diagnosis for this didn’t exist when he was younger. To many outsiders, it didn’t seem that Chuck Close was trying very hard to do anything with his life, and most thought that he wouldn’t amount to much. On top of his learning disorder and his physical maladies, Close also faced more tragedy than any young boy should ever encounter. His father uprooted the family regularly and then died when Chuck was eleven. Around this time, his mother, a classical pianist, developed breast cancer, and the Close family lost their home when the medical bills overwhelmed them. Even his grandmother became terribly ill. What got Close through all of this was his passion for art. “I think early on my art ability was something that separated me from everybody else,” he said in an interview. “It was an area in which I felt competent and it was something that I could fall back on.” He even devised innovative ways to use art to overcome the restrictions of his conditions. He created puppet shows and magic acts—what he called