Yet the block portraits by the artist Chuck Close vividly show the size dependence of shape perception.
Faces are but a gallery of pictures.
Ignore the pupils, nostrils, and the line between the lips, which have much higher resolution than the 1.3-cm grid that represents the rest of the face. Seen from a great distance, the portrait is a visually accurate reproduction of the photo. In his earliest paintings, Close copied details within each square so that the original grid is not visible in the result, but since 1973 he has usually filled each square of the grid on his canvas with content that is independent of the original photo. However, none used coarse grids to render three-dimensional shape, so there is no duality. The mosaics and the pointillist grids are too fine to readily disintegrate into flat marks, and the benday screens are uniform, so that they are always flat at all distances.