Art & Creativity Quote by Chuck Close

Close is doing something sly here: he demystifies painting without devaluing it. By framing most paintings as "a record of the decisions", he drags the medium out of the temple of inspiration and into the workshop. Art isn’t a lightning bolt; it’s a paper trail. That’s a pointed claim from an artist whose signature look - monumental, painstakingly constructed portraits - often gets read as sheer virtuosity or photographic magic. He’s insisting the opposite: what you’re seeing is choice layered on choice, not a single heroic gesture.

The modest hedge ("I think", "perhaps") is classic Close: disarming, almost casual, while delivering a sharp thesis about how images persuade us. The subtext is a critique of romantic mythology. Viewers love to believe paintings arrive fully formed, as expressions of personality or genius. Close redirects attention to process: the grid, the systems, the incremental builds that make an image feel inevitable. When he says he makes those decisions "a little clearer", he’s describing his method - modular marks, visible structure, the portrait that resolves from near-abstraction - but also a political stance about looking. He wants the seams to show.

Context matters. Close rose alongside photo-realism and postwar debates about authenticity, mechanical reproduction, and the death (or reinvention) of painting. His work answers photography not by competing on realism, but by exposing how realism is manufactured. Clarity becomes a kind of honesty: you don’t just see a face; you see the act of constructing belief.