Chuck Close

Since I haven't made any amazing art lately I thought I'd highlight an artist I really admire, Chuck Close.

Chuck Close has an interesting perception disorder called Prosopagnosia, also known as "face blindness" in which the ability to recognize faces and make sense of them is impaired, while the ability to recognize other objects isn't affected. Chuck Close has a fairly severe form of the disorder in which he can't differentiate one face from another at all. People with this disorder learn to tell people apart by the sound of their voices or the way they walk or some other detail that many other people may not pay much attention to. Chuck Close began making photo realistic paintings of people's faces as a way to make sense of them.

He didn't just make paintings, he made enormous paintings. Pretty impressive.

In 1988 Close had a seizure that left him paralyzed from the neck down. In response, he devised a new way to continue his work of painting faces. He now paints faces in a grid format. His finished paintings look a lot like pixelated computer images.

Want to know where you sit on the face blindness scale? Take this test:

http://www.faceblind.org/facetests/index.php