Chuck Close presents faces - of Richard, Mark, Francesco, Elizabeth or Phil. They are friends, or people he knows personally, at least. Working exclusively from photos, he paints the finest details of their physiognomies - wrinkles, pores, facial hair, double-chins -with the clarity of a clinical analysis on huge canvases. His hyperreal painting style sometimes triumphs over the original, and the photographic images seem pale in comparison. Employing sophisticated airbrush, finger-painting, water-color or oil-painting techniques, he has developed a style of portraiture from its early roots in Photo Realism into a painterly approach to the representation of facial landscapes. He works with the Pop Art matrix, transforming it to create delicate patterns and ornaments, spreading it over the entire canvas in an all-over style. This book traces the development of Close's art from Photo Realism to "color portraiture" in 40 works covering a period of 25 years.