careful stroke after another in multi-colors or grayscale. He worked methodically, starting his loose but regular grid from the left hand corner of the canvas. His works are generally larger than life and highly focused. "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs. The everyday nature of the subject matter of the paintings likewise worked to secure the painting as a realist object." Close said he had prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, in which he had difficulty recognizing new faces. By painting portraits, he was better able to recognize and remember faces. On the subject, Close said, "I was not conscious of making a decision to paint portraits because I have difficulty recognizing faces. That occurred to me twenty years after the fact when I looked at why I was still painting portraits, why that still had urgency for me. I began to realize that it has sustained me for so long because I have difficulty in recognizing faces." Although his later paintings differed in method from his earlier canvases, the preliminary process remained the same. To create his grid work copies of photos, Close put a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copied cell by cell. Typically, each square within the grid is filled with roughly executed regions of color (usually consisting of painted rings on a contrasting background) which give the cell a perceived 'average' hue which makes sense from a distance. His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags, razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. His first picture with this method was Big Self Portrait, a black and white enlargement of his face to a canvas, made in over four months in 1968, and acquired by the Walker Art Center in 1969. He made seven more black and white portraits during this period. He has been quoted as saying that he used such diluted paint in the airbrush that all eight of the paintings were made with a single tube of Mars Black acrylic. His later work branched into non-rectangular grids, topographic map style regions of similar colors, CMYK color