Chuck Close
Chuck Close: life and work, 1988-1995
text by John Guare
Publisher: New York, N.Y. : Thames and Hudson in association with Yarrow Press, 1995.
ISBN: 0500092532 DDC: 759.13 LCC: ND1329
p. 36 "Richard Serra and Robert Smithson, my contemporaries, all of us coming up together at the same time, had a belief that if you only have the courage to back yourself into your own corner you would find your way out, but if you stay in the middle of the room you'll be with everyone else and only everybody else's solution will occur to you. We believed that problem creating was more interesting that or at least as interesting as problem solving, that if you can ask yourself the interesting question, the solution will come, that you must purge yourself of the ghosts of everyone else's solutions but putting yourself in a position where none of their answers is applicable. ... So I this is all I knew. I was an artist. I was in trouble. Nobody had any answers that would apply to me. I had to accept where I was and see where it took me. In that horrible room, I painted every day."
