Chuck Close famous quotes

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

#Parameters #Capable

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Needs #Attention

Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don't apply to you. Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work. Every great idea I've ever had grew out of work itself. Sign onto a process and see where it takes you. You don't have to invent the wheel everyday. Today you will do what you did yesterday, tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually, you will get somewhere.
-- Chuck Close

#Inspiration #Ideas #Yesterday

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.
-- Chuck Close

#Inspiration #Clouds #Ideas

Inspiration is for amateurs.
-- Chuck Close

#Inspiration #Writing

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Art #Sound

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Inspiration #Artist #Giving

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

#Photography #Vision #Hardest

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Looks #Likes

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

#Photography #Artist #Enemy

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Inspiration #Clouds

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you.If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens.But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction.
-- Chuck Close

#Dream #Ideas #Long

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Art #Mirrors

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Thinking #Museums

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

#Real #Space #Sculpture

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

#Pieces #Size #Overwhelmed

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

#Photography #Art #Educational

All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.
-- Chuck Close

#Done #Painting #Grids

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Artist #Vegas #Idiot

Every child should have a chance to feel special.
-- Chuck Close

#Children #Special #Chance

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Mind #Facts

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Numbers #Giving

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Yesterday #Today

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

#Photography #Lying #Media

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Frozen #Painting

See, I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to participate in 'problem creation'... You know, ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you'll find yourself all by your lonesome - which I think is a more interesting place to be.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Thinking #Interesting

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

#Photography #Ideas #Process

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Needs #Way

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Kids #Age

Inspiration is for amateurs - the rest of us just show up and get to work. And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will - through work - bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’
-- Chuck Close

#Art #Inspiration #Ideas

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Art #Motivation #Waiting

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

#Nice #Color #Three

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Squares #Color #Oil

I love sculpture, and minimal sculpture is really my favorite stuff, but I wasn't very good at it, and I don't think in a three-dimensional way.
-- Chuck Close

#Thinking #Three #Sculpture

I don't believe in inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. Some of the time you know you're cooking, and the rest of the time, you just do it.
-- Chuck Close

#Believe #Inspiration #Cooking

Once I started working with the Polaroid, I would take a shot and if that shot was good, then I'd move the model and change the lighting or whatever... slowly sneaking up on what I wanted rather than having to predetermine what it was.
-- Chuck Close

#Change #Moving #Polaroids

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

#Crazy #Knowing #Giving

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

#Photography #Cameras #Way

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

#Dirt #Painting #Cry

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

#Suffering #Tragedy #Terrible

If the bottom dropped out of the market and the artist was not going to sell anything, he or she will keep working, and the dealer will keep trying to find some way to convince somebody to buy this stuff.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Artist #Trying

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Ideas #Suggestions

In life you can be dealt a winning hand of cards and you can find a way to lose, and you can be dealt a losing hand and find a way to win. True in art and true in life: you pretty much make your own destiny. If you are by nature an optimistic person, which I am, that puts you in a better position to be lucky in life.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Art #Optimistic

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Real #Realist

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

#Photography #Buddhist #Garden

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

#Innovation #Painting #Results

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

#Dog #Art #Together

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Art #Decision

Neurologically, I'm a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I'm sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.
-- Chuck Close

#Portraits #Firsts #Recognition

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Names #Feet #Long

Of all the artists who emerged in the '80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.
-- Chuck Close

#Artist #Thinking #Important

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Father #Important #Age

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

#Photography #Photographer #Pleasure

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

#Thinking #Doing Me #Ability

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Two #Three

I'm poor white trash from the state of Washington.
-- Chuck Close

#White #Poor #Trash

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

#Thinking #Realising

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

#Photography #Inspiration #Photographer

Far more interesting than problem solving is problem creation.
-- Chuck Close

#Interesting #Problem #Problem Solving

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

#Inspiration #Ideas #Waiting

I've always thought that problem-solving is highly overrated and that problem creation is far more interesting.
-- Chuck Close

#Interesting #Problem #Creation

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Portraits #Faces #Firsts

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

#Reality #Want #Sometimes

At the same time that I'm finding the color world I want, I'm also trying to make the imagery, you know, by the nature of the strokes themselves.
-- Chuck Close

#Color #Trying #World

Ive said its a little bit like a magician performing for a convention of magicians... all the magicians in the audience watching this illusion-Do they see the illusion, or do they see the device that made the illusion? Probably they see a little of both.
-- Chuck Close

#Littles #Illusion #Made

When you come up in the art world, whatevers in the air, the issues of the moment, end up becoming part of the working method or modus operandi of how you think about doing a painting. And I came up at a time when-actually painting was dead when I came up. Sculpture sort of ruled.
-- Chuck Close

#Art #Thinking #Issues

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Hate #Technology #Use

Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don't have the answers. And if you don't have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else's solutions will seem appropriate. You'll have to come up with your own.
-- Chuck Close

#Answers #Trouble #Come Up

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

#Photography #Perfect #Pieces

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Mean #People

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Differences #Doe

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Artist #Photographer

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Being Sad #Use

I have a great deal of difficulty recognizing faces, especially if I haven't - if I've just met somebody, it's hopeless.
-- Chuck Close

#Faces #Hopeless #Mets

I only have so much time and energy and money, and I'm going to put it into my work.
-- Chuck Close

#Energy #Time And Energy

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Artist #Thinking #People

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.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Memories #Thinking

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

#Photography #Eight #Color

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

#Photography #Art #Perception

If it looks like art, chances are it's somebody else's art.
-- Chuck Close

#Photography #Art #Looks

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

#Order #Decision #Figures