Art & Creativity Quote by Chuck Close

Close is poking a thumb in the eye of a gatekeeping profession while defending something artists have always known: the work is the work, and the tools are part of it. Coming from a painter famous for monumental photoreal portraits built through painstaking systems, he’s not making a cute aside about studio tricks. He’s arguing for process over myth.

The intent is blunt: to normalize “aids” like lenses and mirrors as legitimate extensions of the hand, not scandalous shortcuts. Artists, Close suggests, aren’t threatened because their ego isn’t staked on the romantic fantasy of pure, unaided genius. They care about solving problems. If a grid, a photograph, or an optical device gets you to the image you’re chasing, it’s just another brush.

The subtext lands on art history’s anxiety about authenticity. Historians inherit and protect a moral hierarchy: originality versus copying, mastery versus mechanical reproduction, high craft versus “cheating.” Optical aids muddy those categories. If a revered old master relied on technology, then the aura of singular virtuosity gets redistributed - away from the heroic individual and toward workshop practice, available tools, and material conditions. That threatens tidy narratives and the market logic that feeds on them.

Context matters: late-20th-century art had already metabolized photography, conceptual systems, and appropriation. Close’s own practice - methodical, mediated, sometimes explicitly photo-derived - embodies that shift. His line isn’t anti-history; it’s anti-purity. He’s reminding us that art doesn’t emerge from innocence. It emerges from looking, and from whatever helps you look harder.