61 Thought-Provoking Quotes By Chuck Close That Will Foster New Gusto
Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.
All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.
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.
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.
Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don't apply to you.
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 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.
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.
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.
A face is a road map of someone's life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there's a great deal that's communicated about who this person is and what their life experiences have been.
Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.
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 don't work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.
I'm plagued with indecision in my life. I can't figure out what to order in a restaurant.
Every child should have a chance to feel special.
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.
Far more interesting than problem solving is problem creation.
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.
Art saved my life
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.
Every idea occurs while you are working. If you are sitting around waiting for inspiration, you could sit there forever.
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.
Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.
There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.
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.
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.
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.
I think women realise that I love women, and very often women seem to love me.
No one was more surprised than me when my paintings started selling, except maybe my dealer.
Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.
