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Quotes by Chuck Close

All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.
– Chuck Close
And I think, you know, painters drop crumbs along the trail, Hansel and Gretel style, for people to pick up if they want to.
– Chuck Close
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
Certain images are just more interesting, more compelling than others, and some of those are the ones that I've recycled the most. Sometimes it's formal issues, like Philip Glass with his curly dendritic locks that look like Medusa or something.
– Chuck Close
Europe often seems sort of overly concerned with the weight of history and stuff. We don't have much history here, so... .
– Chuck Close
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
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
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 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 don't do commissioned portraits and I don't paint college presidents. I can't imagine what kind of ego it would take to want to have a 9-foot-high picture of yourself.
– Chuck Close
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
I love what used to be called women's work. When women make quilts or something like that, it was something they could pick up or put down, and go back to after they start dinner or weed the garden or whatever... feed the baby. I like that. I liked knowing where I was going to be for a while.
– Chuck Close
I mean, if you think about a writer, you're going to write a novel that takes several months, but there's never a time you're doing anything more than shoving one word up against the next. And clusters of those words make sentences and paragraphs and a chapter. You just try to maintain the same voice and the same attitude so it sounds like the same person wrote the last chapter that wrote the first chapter.
– Chuck Close
I never felt like I had much to do with the people who painted tushies or trucks or something, but it wasn't that I just hated all that stuff. No artist ever likes to be pigeonholed.
– Chuck Close
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
I tried to, with a series of self-imposed limitations, back myself into my own personal corner where nobody else's answers would fit. I've always thought that problem-solving is highly overrated and that problem creation is far more interesting.
– Chuck Close
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
I was living in Rome for a couple of months, a few years ago. In fact, I had sort of made a pilgrimage to Ravenna to see the Byzantine mosaics, and I was disappointed. It was so far away, so high up in the air that you couldn't see the individual tesserae. It was dark and sort of dramatic, and the glistening gold and all of that stuff, and I didn't find them very interesting.
– Chuck Close
I wasn't athletic, I couldn't catch a ball, I couldn't throw a ball, I had all kinds of physical limitations as well. So this was it.
– Chuck Close
I'm plagued with indecision in my life. I can't figure out what to order in a restaurant.
– Chuck Close
I'm very learning-disabled, and I think it drove me to what I'm doing.
– Chuck Close
I've said it's 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
If you ask yourself a personal enough question, your response is more likely to be personal, and that means that if you get yourself into trouble, no one else's answers are going to be applicable, and you'll be flying by the seat of your pants and you'll have to come up with something.
– Chuck Close
If you think about the way a composer would go in a room and score, let's say, the oboe's gonna play this note, the bassoon's gonna play that note, the french horn will play that note, the resultant sound, the combination of those notes makes kind of a chord, and I'm doing the same thing with color.
– Chuck Close
In between those early ones and what I'm doing now, there were all kinds of pieces in which I tried to build works incrementally and let the increments show, so I sprayed dots or I used my finger prints or used chunks of pulp paper, or any one of a number of ways to build an image out of discrete individual units.
– Chuck Close
In Europe, there's a very different attitude towards art-you're sort of given your whole life to make your work, whereas here it's, what have you done lately.
– Chuck Close
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
It's always a pleasure to talk about someone else's work.
– Chuck Close
It's been very gratifying to have people tell me that my work has meaning for them. And you don't really always know that, because you have this sort of ritual dance you do in the studio and the painting is a sort of frozen record, the evidence that the ritual took place. And then it goes out into the world and you don't really know whether or not someone else is dancing along with your piece, so it's nice to have them come back and tell you that it was important for them.
– Chuck Close
It's the tension between the marks on a flat surface, and then the image built, that interested me. And I was always a dyed-in-the-wool formalist anyway. I think process sets you free, because you know you don't have good days or bad days. You just show up. You don't wait for inspiration.
– Chuck Close
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
My parents were both very supportive of the idea of my being an artist. I had trouble in school, and I think they wanted me to feel good about myself and feel special, so when I exhibited interest in magic, they would help me do magic shows, and puppets, and also they got me private art instruction when I was about 8.
– Chuck Close
Of course there are all the negative reviews, which also are incredibly important. Hilton Kramer hated the work, and if he had loved it I would have wanted to commit suicide. I still remember to this day that he called me a lunatic and he said the work is the kind of trash that washed ashore when the tide of pop art went out... and I thought, Gee, if he doesn't like what I'm doing, then I must be on the right track.
– Chuck Close
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
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
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
Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.
– Chuck Close
Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.
– Chuck Close
Susan Sontag said something really funny... she said to find out that all her art heroes cheated and used aids, lenses and things like that, is like finding out all the great lovers in history used Viagra. And you know that doesn't bother me. I don't care what they used to make whatever they wanted to make.
– Chuck Close
The city continues to be a magnet for the best and the brightest that come here from all over the country and all over the world. It's a very vital exciting community. The art world gobbles up people and spits them out the other end and keeps chugging along.
– Chuck Close
The only thing stupider than making a painting was making a representational painting, and of all the genres the most dead and seemingly bankrupt was portraiture.
– Chuck Close
There's a kind of prevailing sensibility in any given moment in time, so sometimes the art world gravitates away from your issues, and then sometimes it will come back towards them.
– Chuck Close
Vermeer was painting light. And so when you walk into a room where the other Dutch painters are, his paintings just sing. And they're an entirely different experience. And I'm sure it's because he was using a camera obscura and he was in fact looking at light while he was painting rather than looking at stuff.
– Chuck Close
Very few people have written about what a work really looks like, especially once there were photographic reproductions of works and so they felt that the photograph would carry the information, and, of course, it does a piss poor job of letting someone know of the scale of the work and of the physicality and how thick the paint was and what the touch was.
– Chuck Close
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
When critics begin to identify something that they see as a tendency, they tend to write about what people have in common. And what they share may not be the most important aspects of the work. In fact, it's what makes each artist's work different from the others which is interesting.
– Chuck Close
When I was walking around I was 6 foot 3, and people didn't tend to approach me very much, and one of the interesting things about being in a wheelchair is it sort of cuts you down to size and perhaps out of sympathy or whatever people feel much more like coming up to you. I'm more accessible I guess down here.
– Chuck Close
When you come up in the art world, whatever's 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
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