The Intricate Art of Michael Mapes

Michael Mapes

I love the work of Michael Mapes who creates intricate and detailed portraits by dissecting thousands of photographs of an individual and taking the tiny fragments and pinning them in place like biological specimens.

Michael Mapes

When I studied biology in school, morbid though it seems, I loved doing dissections. Examining and exploring the inner workings of an eye or a heart or even a whole creature was just fascinating. I’ve always been obsessed with anatomy and pathology and in another life I’m sure I’m living and working as a scenes of crime officer or in the FBI.

Michael Mapes

That’s what draws me into the work of Michael Mapes. His portraiture is amazing. Intricate and meticulously put together. At close range, like a pointilist painting, the detail is amazing and abstract and the figures and faces look distorted and disjointed, but the full picture can only be really seen from a distance when our brains are able to knit together the tiny fragments and make sense of the small pieces and create a whole.

Michael Mapes