I find Chuck Close's remark encouraging. It means to me that that one must work every day regularly and that in the activity of working one can develop skills and in the developing of those skills one can gain insight of the kind that we think of as inspiration.
I've been reading "Turning the Head in Empirical Space" an essay by Rackstraw Downes in Rackstraw Downes. He begins by telling that he first came to think about perspective when he attempted to paint a landscape in upstate New York. He doesn't quite put it this way, but he was surprised that in painting as closely as he could what appeared to his eyes, he produced an image where what was at the periphery of his vision did not fall into a straight horizontal line. This was a discovery that came to him through working, through immersing himself in a task that led him to an unexpected destination. I find that encouraging.
I also find encouraging that he said he completed the painting in a couple of four-hour sessions. That means at least eight hours, maybe more. I'm not quite sure why that's encouraging, but it is. At the very least it means that time put in has the strong possibility of producing something.
I've also been looking at the work of Lucien Freud in Lucien Freud on Paper. All those meticulously observed drawings, all the stippling, the separate lines to indicate fabric or wickerwork or hair. He was quite the example of a hard worker himself.
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