Renowned American artist Chuck Close transpired from the 1960’s group of photorealists and is famous for breathing new life into the art of portrait painting from the late 1960’s to the present day, at a time when photography was challenging painting’s previous dominance in this area, growing ever more popular and gaining critical appreciation as an artistic movement in itself. Close went well beyond what ever came before him when it came to portrait painting. He did not have much interest in painting the full body view but instead only painted his subjects from the neck up. As he turned to one of the oldest traditions in art the self portrait. In 1968 he created, probably one of the largest self portraits ever painted. This piece of work displayed his distinctive technique and superior skills. Chuck Close had to some extent, set out to…show more content… The camera sees with one eye (the lens) and has singular vision; the vision of humans is binocular. This monocular way of seeing by the camera produces a lot of anomalies that are noticed when we look at photographs. The distortions that the camera produces are very recognisable. When a full face-view photo is captured the nose may seem out of proportion with the rest of the face and greatly exaggerated in size. Chuck Close knew of these anomalies and distortions caused by the camera and did nothing to rectify or compensate these issues. Instead, he chose to embrace them and use them to his advantage to create his paintings. He really wanted the viewer to be very conscious of the exact nature of the foundation of his practice. He is in fact painting an accurate imitation of a photograph, rather than painting a portrait of a particular person. “The use of what has been called intermediary material has, among American artists in particular, been a significant factor in the advancement of the super realist style. (Lucie-Smith,
