Chuck Close is one of the great artists of our time.
The book Wisdom, by Andrew Zuckerman, includes the following from Close:
Now that my children are grown and in another house, I work essentially three hundred and sixty-five days of the year….In a lot of professions, they’re waiting for Friday. They can’t wait for Friday, and then they try to make up over the weekend for how numbingly boring their life is all week long….We are free to pick and choose the careers we want to have, we don’t have to work for the state, we don’t have to work on a collective farm, if you are an artist you don’t have to make propaganda that supports the government, we’re free to find something that we enjoy doing that also will bring us enough financial remuneration to allow us to continue to live. And upwards of eighty percent of the public say they get no pleasure whatsoever from what they do for a living. And that’s most of their life. It just seems crazy.
Chuck Close | Living Your Values