Too Close for Comfort

It's 10:18p.m. on a Friday night and I'm home alone (a rare occurence), watching an interview with the artist Chuck Close on a PBS show, "New York Voices." My husband is having beers with a couple of his friends. I didn't make plans because, well, I hardly ever make plans on Friday nights anymore because I never know how late I'm going to be stuck at work. Tonight, I got out at 7:30. But last week, I think it was 9:30. And I've been at work as late as 2 a.m. Saturday next morning. We close on Fridays and as a writer, when I leave depends entirely on when the three editors and the page designer sign off on my work. Even when I write for the web, I have to wait around until my editor--and then a copy editor--read my story. Of course, I'm glad we have such a vetting process. But it can be frustrating on a Friday night, when you have friends from out of town visiting (as was the case when I was at the office until 2a.m.) or a holiday party to attend (as I did in December, when I was stuck at work for 2 hours longer than I'd anticipated so we arrived at the party an hour later than we'd intended) or plans with friends (who are reluctant these days to ever make a firm plan with me on a Friday). But my friends understand my work obligations, and it's no big deal to arrive late to a party (who wants to be the first to show up anyway?). But a child doesn't understand work obligations or late arrivals. That's what I worry about.
Still, I'm getting ahead of myself. And tonight, I'll admit it is nice just to have an evening at home to relax.
I've only caught snippets of the interview with Chuck Close. What interested me most was the reaction he said his subjects had when they saw their portraits--oversized close-ups of their faces. Most of them, he said, couldn't take it. They immediately went off and altered their appearance--dying or cutting their hair, or shaving off their beard. They sometimes avoided looking at their portrait. Even when he talked about his self-portraits (for which he's most famous), I noticed he refered to the subject as "he" instead of "me."
At the end of the interview, the host Rafael Pi Roman asked Close what he thought his legacy would be. This is what he said (I typed as he spoke). I thought it was an interesting response. "No one ever knows whether your work is going to have urgency in other times," he said. "You know where you stack up in the horizontal; you know where you stack up now. But you don't know how your work is going to stack up in the vertical--50 or 100 years from now."
Interesting to think of all the art that may build on his in the future, all the future generations of artists who may be influenced by him. Will anyone be influenced by my work?