Chuck Close (b. 1940)
“In an ideal world, I would work six hours a day, three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon,” Close said recently.
That’s what I always liked to do. Especially since my kids were born. I used to work at night, but when my kids were born I couldn’t just work at night and sleep during the day. So that’s when I started having a kind of regular, nine-to-five work schedule. And if I work more than three hours at a time, I really start screwing up. So the idea is to work for three hours, break for lunch, go back and work for three hours, and then, you know, break. Sometimes I could go back and work in the evening, but basically it was counterproductive. At a certain point, I’d start making enough mistakes that I would spend the next day trying to correct them.
Unfortunately, Close says, his wife now has so many obligations that he is often unable to stick to this routine. (He tries to schedule all meetings and phone calls for after 4:00 P.M., but has found that this is not always possible.) When he does find the time to work, he never lacks for ideas. “Inspiration is for amateurs,” Close says. “The rest of us just show up and get to work.” While he paints, he likes to have the TV or the radio playing in the background–particularly if there’s a juicy political scandal happening. “My finest hours were Watergate, Iran-Contra, the impeachment,” he says. The constant chatter can be distracting, He admits, but he claims that this is actually a good thing: “I like a certain amount of distraction. It keeps me from being anxious. It keeps things at a little bit more of an arm’s length.”
* Source: Daily Rituals by Mason Currey