Chuck Close Quotes
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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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What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.
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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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Of all the artists who emerged in the '80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.
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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 think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.
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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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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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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 plagued with indecision in my life. I can't figure out what to order in a restaurant.
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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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Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.