Chuck Close Quotes

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?

I think women realise that I love women, and very often women seem to love me.

Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it’s not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.

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.

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

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.

I’m very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.

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.

Of all the artists who emerged in the ’80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.

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.

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.

I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.

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.

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

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.

Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don’t get a photograph that I want to work from.

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.

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

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’m poor white trash from the state of Washington.

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.

Every child should have a chance to feel special.

I knew from the age of five what I wanted to do. The one thing I could do was draw. I couldn’t draw that much better than some of the other kids, but I cared more and I wanted it badly.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I’m very learning-disabled, and I think it drove me to what I’m doing.