The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case. Chuck Close
About This Quote

The above quote is by artist, poet, and author John Keats. This quote captures the essence of “artists block”. Artists don't always feel like they are blocked, they just feel like they need a great idea to get started. The problem with this is that we can get caught up in the idea of "great ideas" and not actually do anything productive.

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More Quotes By Chuck Close
  1. The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to...
  2. Amateurs look for inspiration the rest of us just get up and go to work.
  3. Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space...
  4. Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.
  5. Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.
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