Quotes About Chuck Close

#1. I like a lot of modern art. I like Chuck Close a lot. It doesn't necessarily directly influence the work I draw on the page.

Jim Lee

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

Chuck Close

#3. Being tired isn't the same as being rich, but most times it's close enough.

Chuck Palahniuk

#4. 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

#5. I don't care about the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim isn't involved in anything that I am interested in. I don't care about motorcycles and Armani suits.

Chuck Close

#6. Yes, Icarus fell to earth after flying too close to the sun, but what a glorious fall it must have been. Almost worth the flaming wings tied to his arms, waving helplessly in a shower of

Chuck Palahniuk

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

Chuck Close

#8. 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

#9. Why do you always come in to kiss me while I'm on the toilet?" I asked.
"Makes us feel close to you," Chuck said, surprised I would ask. "Peeing is one of the special things we share.

Merrill Markoe

#10. Abortion occurs so frequently in my stories. Abortion sort of synthesizes both sex and death. To have sex and death placed as close to one another as possible is always a goal of mine.

Chuck Palahniuk

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

Chuck Close

#12. 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

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

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close

#16. To merely observe your culture without contributing to it seems very close to existing as a ghost.

Chuck Palahniuk

#17. 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

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

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.

Chuck Palahniuk

#23. Far more interesting than problem solving is problem creation.

Chuck Close

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. I always thought problem solving was greatly overrated - and that the most important thing was problem creation.

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close

#28. There are very close ties between the Jewish and Mormon people.

Chuck Schumer

#29. 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

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

Chuck Close

#31. 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

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

Chuck Close

#33. 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

#34. I believe the war on terror is the vital discussion of this decade and of our generation, probably. To win the war on terror, you need a good offense and a good defense. On defense, I regret to say, basically, this administration has not come close to doing what is necessary.

Chuck Schumer

#35. The close-up, according to D.W. Griffith, allows subtle changes of facial expression-the raising of an eyebrow or the flicker of a smile-to become part of the action.

Chuck Jones

#36. 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

#37. Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

Chuck Close

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

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

Chuck Close

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. Women in general interest me. I like how women are more liable to talk about real things, personal things.

Chuck Close

#48. Here at St. Anthony's, they have to close the curtains before it gets dark, since if a resident sees themself reflected in a window they'll think somebody's peeping in at them. It's called "sun-downing." When all the old folks get crazy at sunset.

Chuck Palahniuk

#49. 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

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

Chuck Close

#51. 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

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

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close

#56. 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

#57. 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.

Chuck Close

#58. 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

#59. Use the words that live inside your head. And if the words that live inside your head are those of a sentimental Victorian troubadour, then please close your head in a door jamb until you kill all that overwrought prose in an act of brain damage.

Chuck Wendig

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.

Chuck Close

#66. Our foreign policy needs to support our energy, economic, defense and domestic policies. It all falls within the arch of national interest. There will be windows of opportunity, but they will open and close quickly.

Chuck Hagel

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

Chuck Close

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. I would not trade America's position in the world - our ledger, our debts and assets - for any country in the world. There isn't a country in the world even close to America.

Chuck Hagel

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

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close

#73. 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

#74. The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

Chuck Palahniuk

#75. 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

#76. Every child should have a chance to feel special.

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. People used what they called a telephone because they hated being close together and they were scared of being alone.

Chuck Palahniuk

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

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

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.

Chuck Close

#89. No one was more surprised than me when my paintings started selling, except maybe my dealer.

Chuck Close

#90. 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

#91. Art saved my life in two ways. It made me feel special, because I could do things my friends couldn't, but it also gave me a way to demonstrate to my teacher that, despite the fact that I couldn't write a paper or do math, I was paying attention.

Chuck Close

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

Chuck Close

#93. I love making art ... It's largely how I see myself. I'm an artist; therefore I have to make art.

Chuck Close

#94. 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

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

Chuck Close

#96. 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

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

Chuck Close

#98. 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.

Chuck Close

#99. You'd be surprised just how fast you can close the door on your past. Learn needlepoint. Make a stained-glass lamp.

Chuck Palahniuk

#100. Let's say Donald Trump loses but it's close. That could change the whole way the job of being a politician shifts - that to succeed in politics, you have to be a caricature of what a politician is supposed to be like.

Chuck Klosterman