Happy birthday, #ChuckClose! Regram matt_careywilliams: Charles Thomas "Chuck" Close was born today in 1940. He is widely regarded as one of America's greatest living artists. Executing often monumental images of his friends or himself in a variety of different media it is, perhaps, his earlier Brobdingnagian self-portraits, rendered in a mind-bogglingly detailed photorealist fashion, that are his most celebrated works. Here he is photographed with his own "Big Self-Portrait" from 1967-68 and now in the collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Close turned portraiture in to landscape painting; reality in to fiction and painting in to sheer dramatic spectacle.