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Higham competed in many of the
world’s great ocean races, including the
first Whitbread round-the-world race in
1973-74, when he steered a Nicholson 55
yacht for 5,000 miles through the
Southern Ocean with no rudder. He
represented Britain in six Admiral’s
Cups, winning one in 1977, and he came
fifth overall in the 1980 Sydney-Hobart
race. He was also involved in several
Fastnet races and was captain of the
Royal Naval sailing team for seven years,
skippering an 80ft Maxi yacht in the
1994 Britannia Cup at Cowes.Commander Tony Higham
Naval officer who competed in many ocean-going races and led the fundraising for flood defences in his Hampshire village
To say that Tony Higham had an affilia-
tion with water is to understate. If he
wasn’t sailing the seas with the navy or
winning an ocean race, he was leading
the campaign for flood defences in the
Hampshire village of Hambledon.
Even being at the centre of a lifeboat
operation in August 1970 did not deter
him. On that occasion he was skipper of
a crew of six naval cadets on the Teme-
raire, a 36ft Bermudian rigged sloop,
which was reported missing. Penlee
lifeboat was launched, other shipping
stood by to assist and two helicopters
began a search. The Temeraire was
eventually sighted 30 miles south of the
Lizard light, but Higham managed to
rerig the yacht, which sailed into Fal-
mouth under its own steam. “When
rounding the Scillies we began to en-
counter the most vicious storm I have
ever been in,” he told The Times. “Off
the Lizard the seas were reaching the
top of the mast, about 35ft, certainly
enough to overpower a small yacht.”
There were less choppy waters when
he was sharing duties with Prince
Charles, his fellow sub-lieutenant on
HMS Norfolk in the early 1970s. For
security reasons he once stood in as a
body double for the prince and was
driven down Main Street, Gibraltar, in
the ship’s open-top Land Rover while
his royal colleague slipped quietly on
board via a back route.
In 2013 he received a bravery award
from the Royal Humane Society after
helping to pull three people from a blaz-
ing car on a country lane near Winch-
ester. “We could hear the burning and I
could feel my right buttock getting a bit
hot,” he recalled. “But we were focused
on getting this chap out.”
Anthony Higham was born in Hen-
don, north London, in 1948 to Maurice
Higham, who on D-Day drove one of
the landing craft that delivered troops
on to the beach in northern France, and
his wife Winifred (née Child); he had a
brother, Mike, a retired headmaster. By
the age of 11 Tony had recovered from
tuberculosis, survived being knocked
down by a car, fused the entire street’s
electricity supply by tampering with a
plug socket, and had somehow man-
aged to avoid blowing himself up when
packing chemicals into a mustard tin to
make a rocket that he was able to
launch into his neighbour’s garden.
He won a scholarship to Haberdash-
ers’ School in Cricklewood and then
Elstree. From school he joined Britan-
nia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth,
where he acquired the nickname
“Yachts”. It was the start of a 37-year
career in which he served in six Royal
Navy ships.
In 1973 he took part in the Cape
Town-Rio race. To get there he secured
a first-class passage on a cruise ship, theEdinburgh Castle. On the voyage he
met Lindy Andrews, who was on her
way to become a medical secretary with
Christiaan Barnard, the heart-trans-
plant pioneer. They were married in
1975 and she survives him with their
children: Duncan, a former Royal Mari-
nes officer who now runs an American
medical company; Nick, a partner at
McKinsey; Alex, a property developer;
and Charlotte, a solicitor. He was not
always practical around them and once
inadvertently made a cup of tea for the
builder using expressed breast milk
from the fridge.
Higham’s naval career featured a fair
share of diplomatic work; at Nato he
was involved in integrating the Czech
Republic, Hungary and Poland into the
alliance. He helped with planning the
Queen’s golden jubilee celebrations in
2002 and his final appointment con-
cerned the commemorations in HMS
Victory in 2005 to mark the 200th
anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.
Untroubled by self-doubt, Higham
wrote letters on a range of subjects to
national newspapers. In Hambledon,
the birthplace of cricket, he led a cam-
paign that led to a £3.9 million invest-
ment in the local flood defences, keep-
ing villagers updated by firing off email
bulletins. “We have a large number of
hungry workers and volunteers round
the clock,” read one. “Ladies of Hamble-don (and gentlemen), I have sampled
your delicious cakes and sandwiches.
Any chance of some more please?”
Over the past decade he worked with
the organisers of Strictly Come Dancing
to provide tickets for the show to 30 vet-
erans around the time of Remem-
brance Sunday. On other occasions he
organised concerts in Hambledon vil-
lage church that raised more than
£165,000 for Royal Marines charities.
Higham was never happier than
when on his yacht Windsong with a
glass of champagne. He was a regular
participant at Cowes Week, eventually
becoming flight director for the air dis-
play. In 2018 he arranged for the Red
Arrows to fly over the Solent during a
rare parade of Cunard’s “three queens”,
the Queen Mary 2, Queen Elizabeth
and Queen Victoria. Immediately after
the flypast a dowager leant across to
him and said: “My good man, would
you mind terribly asking them to fly
round again so I could get some more
photos?” It was perhaps the only time
he was unable to get something done.Commander Tony Higham, BEM,
yachtsman, was born on October 12,- He died from a brain tumour on
November 24, 2021, aged 73
Higham won the Admiral’s Cup in 1977Email: [email protected]Close’s Big Self Portrait, completed in 1968. Left, in New York City in 2013feet, and a bout of nephritis that kept
him out of school for nearly a year.
He got his first insight into painterly
realism while looking at the cover of The
Saturday Evening Post. “They were using
painted covers,” he recalled, “I hadn’t
seen any real paintings, or very few. I
realised that this was a language, a
pictorial language, that I could decode.”
His early life was difficult. He strug-
gled at school owing to his dyslexia, and
when he was 11 his father died. “Funnily
enough there was a gift in this tragedy,”he said. “I learnt very early in life that
the absolute worst thing can happen to
you and you will get past it and you will
be happy again.”
Told by his teachers not even to think
of applying to college, he felt he became
an artist because it was the only thing
he could do. He enrolled in his local
junior college and then transferred to
the University of Washington, from
which he graduated as an arts major in- He then began a master of fine
arts course at Yale.
A year studying in Vienna on a Ful-
bright grant followed, and then he took
a teaching job at the University of Mas-
sachusetts in Amherst. It was there that
he met Leslie Rose, a student in his
drawing class. They married in 1967
and had two daughters. After their di-
vorce in 2011, in 2013 he married the art-
ist Sienna Shields, though that mar-
riage also ended in divorce.
Having painted abstract pictures
while in college, he developed his signa-
ture style in the late 1960s. He moved to
Manhattan in 1967, and the following
year completed a characteristically pel-
lucid self-portrait, bare-chested and
smoking a cigarette, his face set in an
cocksure expression.
In 1972 he was the focus of an exhibi-
tion at the Museum of Modern Art. The
museum hosted a retrospective of his
work in 1998, an honour he shared with
artists such as Picasso and Matisse.
However, in 2017 several women
alleged that Close had harassed them
between 2005 and 2013, some of them
while they were posing in his studio.
They accused him not of physically as-
saulting them, but of abusing them with
vulgar language. “If I embarrassed any-
one or made them feel uncomfortable, I
am truly sorry, I didn’t mean to,” he said.
“I acknowledge I have a dirty mouth, but
we’re all adults.” His conduct may have
been the result of frontotemporal de-
mentia, diagnosed in 2015, which disin-
hibits its sufferers. The National Gallery
of Art in Washington indefinitely post-
poned an exhibition of his work.
Regardless of how the art world re-
members the artist, his giant canvasses
are testament to a singular talent.
Asked once why they were so big, he
replied that it made them harder to
ignore. “There’s the cry of a small child
in most artists,” he said in 1998, “saying
‘I am here, I am somebody, I made this
stuff, will you please look at it?’ And
that’s been true of me for 30 years.”Chuck Close, artist, was born on July 5,- He died of cardiopulmonary
failure on August 19, 2021, aged 81
Chuck Close
Super-realist artist whose portraits of subjects including Lou Reed and Bill Clinton stare inscrutably from his giant canvasses
CHUCK CLOSE/WALKER ART CENTER
At first glance, Chuck Close’s 1979 work
Mark looks like a characterful photo-
graph, catching the first hint of a smile
on its subject’s face. It’s a tightly focused
picture, showing him only from the
neck up, but it’s also nearly three metres
tall. This creates an uncomfortable inti-
macy between the viewer and the sub-
ject. Look closely, and you can see pores
in his skin, and spots of stubble on his
jaw. Look even closer, and you’ll
see that those spots are in fact
spots of paint. You’re not
looking at a photograph
after all.
Chuck Close spe-
cialised in paintings
of such extreme fi-
delity that they
trick the eye. Many
of those who sat for
his paintings were
fellow artists, such
as Jasper Johns,
Cindy Sherman and
Kara Walker, but he also
painted Lou Reed, Philip
Glass and Bill Clinton. All of
his paintings were large. His seven-
metre-long Big Nude (1967) is harder to
comprehend as a whole than as a land-
scape of depersonalised features.
Critics labelled Close’s style “photo-
realism”, grouping him with the older
painters Richard Estes and Robert
Bechtle, who began copying photo-
graphs in the 1960s. Close rejected the
label, saying that “I had trouble with the
word realist because I was simultane-
ously as interested in artificiality as I
was in reality, and it’s always been this
tension between the distribution of
marks on a flat surface and then how it
warps into a head.”
He wanted his viewers to reflect on
the way that blotches of paint, skilfully
arranged, can trick the eye into seeing a
reproduction of reality. This theme be-
came more obvious as his career pro-
gressed. Having spent the 1960s pro-
ducing pictures that could be mistaken
for photographs, in the 1970s he became
more overtly experimental. Plotting his
portraits on a grid, he coloured in each
square as though it were a piece in a
mosaic, or a pixel in a photograph, ar-
ranging them to form a blurry likeness
of his sitter.
Experimenting with grids was his
way to “reintroduce a little degree of
difficulty and a little resistance”. He
needed that difficulty because, he said,
“ease is the great enemy of the artist”.
He suspected that his desire to
create art emerged from
the face-blindness that
had hindered him his
whole life, which
made it hard for
him to remember
what someone
looked like even
if he had dined
with them the
night before. He
found it easier to
remember faces
when they were flat-
tened into photo-
graphs and paintings.
The gritty pleasure he took
in such challenges kept him san-
guine when, in 1988, his anterior spinal
artery collapsed, initially paralysing
him from the neck down. Over the next
few months he was able to recover
movement in his arms, allowing him to
paint with a brush strapped to his arm.
Working in a studio equipped with
spinning easels that allowed him to
paint large pictures from his wheel-
chair, he filled looser grids with abstract
shapes. His subjects emerged from
them as if through patterned glass.
“I want people to see what made the
image,” Close said, referring to the
blobs of colour in his grids. “I like drop-
ping crumbs along the trail like Hansel
and Gretel.”
Chuck Close was born in Monroe,
Washington state, in 1940 to Mildred
(née Wagner) and Leslie, a plumber,
decorator and inventor who made him
his first easel when Chuck was five. As
a child he suffered from a neuromuscu-
lar condition that made it hard to lift hisre in fact
e not
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Philip
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The gritty p
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