Chuck Close Quotes

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 lightning 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.

All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Inspiration is for amateurs.

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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