Chuck Close Quotes

I'm not by nature a terribly intuitive person; I need to build a situation in which I will behave more intuitively, and that has really changed the life of my work - I found a way to trick myself into being intuitive.

I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.

I'm plagued with indecision in my life. I can't figure out what to order in a restaurant.

I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another.In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.

After a few days in hospital, I was thinking, Oh, gee - I raised in a church, Protestant upbringing which I'd rejected as an adult - I'm lying in bed thinking, Hmmm, maybe I ought to pray. They always say there are no atheists in a foxhole... and I thought, Here I am in a pretty good-sized foxhole... and I thought Naahhh. I wouldn't respect any God who would listen to me after I'd rejected him so vociferously.

All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.

I love making art... It's largely how I see myself. I'm an artist; therefore I have to make art.

It's always a pleasure to talk about someone else's work.

Any artist who goes to Las Vegas is an idiot as far as I am concerned. Whoever goes to Las Vegas can stay in Las Vegas.

It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.

I always thought problem solving was greatly overrated - and that the most important thing was problem creation.

Paintings can make you cry and it's just **colored dirt**.

I've always thought that problem-solving is highly overrated and that problem creation is far more interesting.

There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.

Inspiration is for amateurs. professionals work everyday. Personally the best inspiration is a deadline.

Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.

I have a great deal of difficulty recognizing faces, especially if I haven't - if I've just met somebody, it's hopeless.

In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.

From my point of view, photography never got any better than it was in 1840.

Every idea occurs while you are working. If you are sitting around waiting for inspiration, you could sit there forever.

It always amazes me that just when I think there's nothing left to do in photography and that all permutations and possibilities have been exhausted, someone comes along and puts the medium to new use, and makes it his or her own, yanks it out of this kind of amateur status, and makes it as profound and as moving and as formally interesting as any other medium.

I have always attempted to create images that deliver the maximum amount of information about the subject.

A photograph doesn't gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It's frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.

I only have so much time and energy and money, and I'm going to put it into my work.

If you're overwhelmed by the size of a problem, break it down into smaller pieces.

Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you.

There are things about signing on to a process over the long term that protect you from the buffeting winds of change.

The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.

Having a routine, knowing what to do, gives me a sense of freedom and keeps me from going crazy. It's calming.

Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don't have the answers. And if you don't have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else's solutions will seem appropriate. You'll have to come up with your own.

Inspiration is for amateurs.

Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.

I absolutely hate technology, and I'm computer illiterate, and I never use any labor-saving devices although I'm not convinced that a computer is a labor-saving device.

I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings.

It's like a magic well. You think you know everything about [a] photograph, you think you've gotten everything out of it, and all of a sudden I see things in it I'd never seen before.

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 lightning 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.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that's embedded in the work.

Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don't apply to you. Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work. Every great idea I've ever had grew out of work itself. Sign onto a process and see where it takes you. You don't have to invent the wheel everyday. Today you will do what you did yesterday, tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually, you will get somewhere.

If it looks like art, chances are it's somebody else's art.

There are so many artists that are dyslexic or learning disabled, it's just phenomenal. There's also an unbelievably high proportion of artists who are left-handed, and a high correlation between left-handedness and learning disabilities.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

I'm poor white trash from the state of Washington.

Far more interesting than problem solving is problem creation.

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.

I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.

When you come up in the art world, whatevers in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting. And I came up at a time when-actually painting was dead when I came up. Sculpture sort of ruled.