Art & Creativity Quote by Chuck Close

Close is basically daring you to stop looking for the trick. In a career where the “how” often threatens to upstage the “what” (photorealism, the grid, the camera-like stare), this line strips away the comforting myth that his work is a mechanical translation. The fingerprint paintings are the ultimate bait-and-switch: they read, from across the room, as clinically precise portraits, then up close dissolve into smudged, bodily marks that feel closer to evidence than brushwork. Saying they’re “done without a grid” isn’t a technical footnote; it’s a declaration of agency.

The grid, in the Close story, is famous as both method and metaphor: a way to break an overwhelming image into manageable units, a discipline that helped him work systematically, especially after the 1988 spinal cord injury that reshaped his physical process. So when he emphasizes the absence of the grid here, he’s rejecting the idea that his art is merely a product of scaffolding. The fingerprint becomes a different kind of structure: not an external measuring device, but an internal, repeatable gesture, a unit of touch.

Subtext: control isn’t the same as coldness. Close is arguing that intimacy can be engineered without being fake. The portrait, traditionally a site of personality and aura, gets rebuilt out of forensic residue. No grid means no visible safety net - just the artist’s body, insistently present, turning identity into pattern and then back into a face.