I’ve been a fan of the work of Chuck Close for some time, admiring the grand scale that much of his work assumes as well as his evolution as an artist, especially given his challenges after a spinal artery collapse left him paralyzed from the neck down in 1988. He regained slight use of his arms and continued to paint, creating work through this time that rates among his best. He also suffers from prosopagnosia which is face blindness, meaning that he cannot recognize faces. He has stated that this is perhaps the main reason he has continued his explorations in portraiture for his entire career. The piece shown here is a portrait of composer Phillip Glass that was made using only Close’s fingerprints, a technique which presaged his incorporation of his own unique form of pixelation into his painting process.
His determination to overcome, to keep at it, is a big attraction for me and should be an object lesson for most young artists (and non-artists, also) who keep putting off projects until all the conditions are perfect and all the stars align. Waiting for the muse of inspiration to take them by the hand and lead them forward. Sometimes you have to meet the muse halfway and Close has this advice for those who hesitate:
The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the… work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
Amen to that. The process provides the inspiration. I’ve stumbled around for some time trying to say this but never could say it as plainly and directly as Close has managed. Thanks, Chuck. I think I’ll take your advice and get to work.
Redtree Times 
“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”
– Thomas Edison
As succinct as it can be said! This has always been one of my favorite quotes.
When I began blogging, my greatest fear was that I would run out of things to say.
After nearly four years, I’ve published 215 posts and have 161 “drafts” in my files. Granted, those “drafts” may be only a title, a quotation, or a few paragraphs and an outline, but there they are. Some will be completed, some will be tossed, but Close is right: it’s work that primes the pump at the well of creativity.
I certainly don’t disdain “how to write” books or courses, and I’m always interested in how good writers “do it”. But from the beginning, I’ve assumed that the way to learn to write is to write. It’s nice to see someone else articulate my intuitive sense of things so well.
I felt the same way about writing a blog, that I would soon run out of things to say. Well, there are many days when I still feel that way and there are folks who probably think that I ran out years ago. But the act of getting at this everyday has fed itself many times. Primed the pump, as you say.
I have a small portion of this quote on my studio wall: “Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.” In 2007 I signed up for the challenge of creating 40 pieces of art in 30 days while blogging about it. It was such a huge challenge but through it, one of the things I learned was this very thing. You don’t need to be inspired in order to paint, you just need to paint and the inspiration will come.
Great Post!
Thanks, Rebecca.