Chuck Close on Inspiration
There are no mystical creative forces, only hard work.
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”
- Chuck Close
Chuck Close is an American artist. He is a portrait painter, but that description is too pedestrian to describe his innovative work. Close takes portrait photographs of people but then reproduces those photographs on canvas adding geometric features to bring out the character of the person pictured. An example is one of his self-portraits to the left. His techniques are no mere gimmick, as evidenced by his photorealistic portrait paintings showing tremendous ability to capture real life.
The Pace Gallery page on Close.
The discussion of artistic technique is best left to others. As a philosopher, I want to talk about the importance of the idea he expressed in the quote above. A grand myth about art and artists is that creativity and artistic genius are some kind of rare mystic and mysterious forces. The myth holds that these mystical creative forces are possessed or channeled only by an elite few rarefied souls, chosen by fate to be…
