Life Can Imitate Art

Lessons from today's great artists.

I draw inspiration and lessons from art. When life is challenging, I think about the story of American painter, artist, and photographer Chuck Close.

Chuck Close is considered in some circles to be one of the top 50 most influential artists in the world. He’s one of the few artists to turn DOWN a major retrospective at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

His road to success was anything but easy.

He was big, clumsy, and not athletic. As a child, he suffered from a neuromuscular condition that made it difficult to lift his feet, a bout with nephritis that kept him out of school for a year, and overall challenges in school due to dyslexia.

At the age of 49, Close was at the height of his career as a portrait painter when he was stricken with a spinal blood clot that left him a quadriplegic. He started a grueling rehab process which included holding a brush between his teeth to have enough control to paint. Many thought his career was over, but this new style of painting allowed him to continue to be one of the great American painters of our time.

“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 lightening 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.” ― Chuck Close

Challenges can throw you off course, but with hard work and determination, we can always get back on track.