Chuck Close

Chuck close Born: 1940, Monroe, WA. His style in painting can be called super realism or photorealism; he created a link between painting and photography. Photorealist used a grid method to expand and decrease each one of the squares to formal elements of design but most of them used the airbrush technique.


 

From close up the picture is not clear, it just looks like many abstract shapes but as you pull back, everything is shown clearly.
Chuck’s first big self-portrait mural-sized painting from photographs in black and white was incredible, doing this he took quite a lot of photographs of his neck and head so it fills up in t he frame and he painted in precision and delicacy and included shapes, texture, volume, shadows and highlights, that’s what made his painting amazing to look at.
Close had an unpleasant incident which affected him greatly as he had a spinal blood clot, which tragically left him not capable to use either his legs or his arms, but that did not stop him painting, he carried on and decided to put the paint brush in between his teeth even though the result was mini-paintings but from far it looked as a single or combined image.

References

http://thebeautifulbrain.com/category/dispatches/page/3/
http://www.chuckclose.coe.uh.edu/life/index.html