Chuck Close

Chuck Close (2009)

Chuck Thomas Close (born July 5, 1940, in Monroe, Washington – August 19, 2021) is an American painter and photographer. He achieved fame as a photorealist through his portraits on a massive scale.

Quotes

• [Do you have a motto or creed that as an artist you live by?] Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great "art idea". And the belief that process, in a sense, is liberating and that you don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today, you know what you'll do, you could be doing what you were doing yesterday, and tomorrow you are gonna do what you did today, and at least for a certain period of time you can just work. If you hang in there, you will get somewhere.
  • Inside the Painter's Studio, Joe Fig, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009, p. 42