"I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person. You can make something that looks like a head, with fewer dots, but you won't be able to give much information about who it is"
About this Quote
Close turns portraiture into a counting problem, and in doing so he quietly indicts our faith in artistic “essence.” The line lands because it’s both nerdy and a little profane: the soul of a person, reduced to a threshold of roughly 150 marks. Not a brushstroke blessed by genius, not a mystical likeness, but an empirical minimum viable identity.
The intent is practical, rooted in his studio logic. Close worked from photographs, translating faces into grids, cells, and accumulations of tiny decisions. His portraits aren’t about capturing a fleeting aura; they’re about how recognition actually happens. We don’t perceive a person all at once. We assemble them from cues: spacing of eyes, angle of a mouth, the particular asymmetry you’d miss in a “generic head.” “Fewer dots” can produce a human template, but it won’t produce a specific human. That distinction is the whole game.
The subtext is cultural: identity is informational. Close is describing a bandwidth limit. Under a certain resolution, individuality collapses into stereotype. It’s a sharp metaphor for how media, memory, even prejudice operate: when you don’t have enough data, you fill in the blanks with defaults.
Context matters, too. After his 1988 spinal collapse, Close continued making work through painstaking, modular methods, often with assistants, emphasizing process over romantic spontaneity. The quote reflects that ethos: art as systems, patience, and perception science - and a reminder that “likeness” is less magic than math plus attention.
The intent is practical, rooted in his studio logic. Close worked from photographs, translating faces into grids, cells, and accumulations of tiny decisions. His portraits aren’t about capturing a fleeting aura; they’re about how recognition actually happens. We don’t perceive a person all at once. We assemble them from cues: spacing of eyes, angle of a mouth, the particular asymmetry you’d miss in a “generic head.” “Fewer dots” can produce a human template, but it won’t produce a specific human. That distinction is the whole game.
The subtext is cultural: identity is informational. Close is describing a bandwidth limit. Under a certain resolution, individuality collapses into stereotype. It’s a sharp metaphor for how media, memory, even prejudice operate: when you don’t have enough data, you fill in the blanks with defaults.
Context matters, too. After his 1988 spinal collapse, Close continued making work through painstaking, modular methods, often with assistants, emphasizing process over romantic spontaneity. The quote reflects that ethos: art as systems, patience, and perception science - and a reminder that “likeness” is less magic than math plus attention.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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