He is now revered as one of the greatest American artists, a painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits. Although a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work that remains sought after by museums and collectors. On his physical limitations: “We quadraplegics don’t envy people who can use their arms and legs. We envy paraplegics because they have it much easier than we do.” Here is a sample of what we can learn from Chuck Close about initiative:

“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.”

To watch a brief Chuck Close video, please click here.
To visit his website, please click here.
To check out his biography, please click here.
To check out his page at Artsy, please click here