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E-mail: metallica_inflames@yahoo.com (born 1940) is an American photorealist specializing in close-up portraits and self-portraits. Close is one of the very few modern realists or photorealists who focus on the human face. In 1988, in mid-career, Close was paral ....

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.... source photograph into a grid and creating a corresponding grid on the canvas. He then meticulously transcribes the image onto the canvas square by square, proceeding from the top left to the bottom right. Some of the largest canvases contain thousands of squares; Close completes all of his paintings by hand. Given the painstaking nature of this work, some of the earlier large-scale paintings took up to fourteen months to complete. Close's work falls into two periods, the early and the middle, in which he is now fruitfully engaged. It is easy to divide the two periods on either side of Close's 1988 stroke that left him unable to hold a brush. (He pai ....