CHUCK CLOSE - MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY
Today is the birthday of American artist, Chuck Close. Close is known as a painter and photographer who creates massive scale portraits.
I recently heard a quote that I thought I would share here in honor of his birthday, and because, well, sometimes I need a reminder to just push through and do the work.
“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.”
I included the expanded version of the quote because it is food for thought. I find the sentence about the ideas come out in the process,... in DOING the work especially meaningful.
So, how do you work best? Do you get in there and start working, or do you wait for inspiration? I'm also curious do you carefully plan your work, your projects, your day, your goals or just start working with wild abandon?