Chuck Close Quotes

I paint on the ground. I paint with sticks, with big paint cans, and whatever else falls in it. Basically, what I'm doing is capturing unbridled emotion and putting it on canvas. It's like capturing lightning in a bottle.

I take a pretty expansive view of craft, which is to say I don't see craft as just being technique - it's also process; subject; ideas and feelings; visions and dreams; the words that are put down and the words that are avoided.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.

On an instrument you start from one tone. In painting you start from several.

We have our brush and colors - paint Paradise and in we go.

When I was asked to compose a score for... 'Palo Alto,' I first thought to myself, 'What is the house that these characters would want to live in?' I wanted to paint a picture and color scheme that I could work around. I gently apply different daubs to see what fits to match the color I have in mind with these characters.

My ideas come, wh-pheww. And I draw. Just recently, when I'm searching for ideas for paintings and sculptures, I wait for ideas, and it's always visual.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

Preliminary drawings or sketches in oil or pastel often have an immediacy and emotional appeal far greater than the final canvas.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

I'm a pointillist, just working my tiny little piece of the canvas. I'm not so good at perspective.

I am like a folk painter. Paint and move ahead.

Well, I have a very simple method of painting.

I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained.

If Monsieur X spent an eternity studying treatises on optics, he would never paint 'La Grande Jatte.'

In a perfect world, I would be a painter. I love working with my hands. I don't get to do it as much as I like, but I am finding a way to make more time as life goes on because it's a really great outlet for me to express myself.

There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.