Linda

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Chuck Close photographs friends and acquaintances, then uses those images when making his giant portraits. For this color portrait, he had five color separations made from a single color photograph. After dividing his canvas and each of the separations into a grid of small squares, he painted each square first in magenta, then in cyan (blue) and finally in yellow, mimicking the process of full-color printing. While portrait painting usually emphasizes artists’ intuitive responses to their subjects, Close makes it seem an impersonal, mechanical process. Nonetheless, the enormous size of this image endows it with a strong emotional impact.

Keywords

American
Painting
Frontal
Female
Photo Realism
Close up
Face