Chuck Close Photograph Quotations

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It's like a magic well. You think you know everything about [a] photograph, you think you've gotten everything out of it, and all of a sudden I see things in it I'd never seen before.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It always amazes me that just when I think there's nothing left to do in photography and that all permutations and possibilities have been exhausted, someone comes along and puts the medium to new use, and makes it his or her own, yanks it out of this kind of amateur status, and makes it as profound and as moving and as formally interesting as any other medium.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?