Chuck Close Quotes

All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.

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

If you're overwhelmed by the size of a problem, break it down into smaller pieces.

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.

While photography is the easiest medium in which to be competent, it is the hardest in which to develop an idiosyncratic personal vision.

Inspiration is for amateurs.

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

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.

The thing that interests me about photography, and why it's different from all other media, is that it's the only medium in which there is even the possibility of an accidental masterpiece.

Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.

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.

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.

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

I don't work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.

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.

Inspiration is for amateurs. professionals work everyday. Personally the best inspiration is a deadline.

The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.

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.

You can give the same recipe to ten cooks, and some make it come alive, and some make a flat souffle. A system doesn't guarantee anything.

I have always attempted to create images that deliver the maximum amount of information about the subject.

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.

I only use three primaries, so the nice thing is I can't have favorite colors.

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

I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.

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.

I'm plagued with indecision in my life. I can't figure out what to order in a restaurant.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.

Those who are waiting for an epiphany to strike may wait forever. The artist simply goes to work, making art, both good and not so good.

It's always a pleasure to talk about someone else's work.

Having a routine, knowing what to do, gives me a sense of freedom and keeps me from going crazy. It's calming.

Paintings can make you cry and it's just **colored dirt**.

From my point of view, photography never got any better than it was in 1840.

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.

Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.

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.

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.

Like any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me. It all ends up being my work, the corporate me, but everyone extends ideas and comes up with suggestions.

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.

I learned you could suffer a terrible tragedy and still be happy again.

Any innovation that is evident in my paintings is a direct result of something that happened in the course of making a print.

I am going for a level of perfection that is only mine... Most of the pleasure is in getting the last little piece perfect.

Every idea occurs while you are working. If you are sitting around waiting for inspiration, you could sit there forever.

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

I absolutely hate technology, and I'm computer illiterate, and I never use any labor-saving devices although I'm not convinced that a computer is a labor-saving device.

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.

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

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.

There are things about signing on to a process over the long term that protect you from the buffeting winds of change.

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.