Chuck Close Quotes

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Chuck Close

Profession : Artist

Birth : July 5, 1940

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

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

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.

Chuck Close

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

Chuck Close

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

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

Chuck Close

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 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.

Chuck Close

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

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

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

Chuck Close

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?

Chuck Close

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

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

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close

Every child should have a chance to feel special.

Chuck Close

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.

Chuck Close

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

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

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close