Sculpture occupies real space like we do… you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object. – Chuck Close
There’s something Zen-like about the way I work – it’s like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden. – Chuck Close
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
I don’t want the viewer to be able to peel away the layers of my painting like the layers of an onion and find that all the blues are on the same level. – 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
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
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
I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system. – 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Women in general interest me. I like how women are more liable to talk about real things, personal things. – 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 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
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
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