Chuck Close Quotes
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I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.
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I don't care about the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim isn't involved in anything that I am interested in. I don't care about motorcycles and Armani suits.
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Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.
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Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.
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I have no intention of flattering people. I like wrinkles and crow's feet and flaws, and somebody should know, if I'm going to photograph them, that's going to show up, you know?
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Of all the artists who emerged in the '80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.
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I have a great deal of difficulty recognizing faces, especially if I haven't - if I've just met somebody, it's hopeless.
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Losing my father at a tender age was extremely important in being able to accept what happened to me later when I became a quadriplegic.
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I'm plagued with indecision in my life. I can't figure out what to order in a restaurant.
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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.
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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.
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In the 7th grade, I made a 20-foot long mural of the Lewis and Clark Trail while we were studying that in history because I knew I wasn't going to be able to spit back the names and the dates and all that stuff on a test.
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In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.
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I only have so much time and energy and money, and I'm going to put it into my work.
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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.
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I don't want the viewer to be able to peel away the layers of my painting like the layers of an onion and find that all the blues are on the same level.
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Women in general interest me. I like how women are more liable to talk about real things, personal things.
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Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.
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I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person. You can make something that looks like a head, with fewer dots, but you won't be able to give much information about who it is.
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My mother was a piano teacher, my father an inventor. He invented the reflective paint they still use on airstrips. They had faith in my ambition, and I think that made all the difference.
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The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.
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You don't have to have a great art idea - just get to work and something will happen. So that's pretty much my modus operandi and pretty much my principal position, such as it is.
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Most people are good at too many things. And when you say someone is focused, more often than not what you actually mean is they're very narrow.
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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.