Time & Perspective Quote by Chuck Close

Close treats painting like a magic trick you can’t unsee, and that’s the point: the miracle isn’t “beauty,” it’s engineering. He deliberately drags the medium back down to earth - “colored dirt,” “rub” - to remind you that the raw materials are almost stupidly basic. Then he pivots to the impossible outcome: space on a flat surface, a whole life experience triggered by pigment. The wonder comes from the gap between the crudity of means and the sophistication of effect.

The phrasing also reads like a quiet defense of painting in an age that keeps declaring it dead. Close came up alongside photo-realism and later became synonymous with portraits that feel photographic at a distance and aggressively material up close. So when he marvels at “somebody figured another way,” he’s honoring invention within constraints: new solutions to an ancient problem, not novelty for its own sake. Museums become laboratories of problem-solving, where each canvas is a record of decisions - how to translate light, skin, memory, depth - without any actual depth.

Subtextually, it’s a manifesto for craft over myth. Close doesn’t romanticize the artist as a visionary channeling genius; he admires the practical audacity of making illusion from matter. Coming from an artist who rebuilt his process after paralysis, that emphasis on method lands harder: transcendence isn’t escape from the physical. It’s what disciplined attention can wring from it.