Chuck Close Quotes
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Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.
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You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.
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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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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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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 only have so much time and energy and money, and I'm going to put it into my work.
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Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.
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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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Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.
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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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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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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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In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.
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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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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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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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It's always a pleasure to talk about someone else's work.
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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 think women realise that I love women, and very often women seem to love me.
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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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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.