Chuck Close Quotes

Draw what you see.

Most people draw from the mind, not the eye. They draw the idea of a table or a face, not what's in front of them. We don't actually see the line of the jaw as a line and we don't see an eye as a perfectly outlined almond shape.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

What you're getting excited about is not A face, but a feminine face.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. 'The necessary condition for an image is sight,'Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: 'We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.

One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it.

When I take a picture I take 10 percent of what I see.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

You see, I don't draw from life at all, but I do look out of my window a lot.

You know how when you read a book and it becomes a movie, and it's different than you pictured? In some ways, acting is a lot like that.

As long as they're making beloved books into movies, people are going to be like, 'That's not my mental image of them.' It takes that moment for it to click and become their mental image.

I just can't whip off a likeness of somebody.

The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it.

Everybody has their thing they like or don't like to see. It's all in your head. That's why people take their own pictures, because it's difficult for someone else to capture what you seek.

A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see. Following up its logic in order to check its accuracy, you find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it.

There's something really magical about trying to see things in new ways that go beyond, in some sense, the biological human experience. Light-field photography, too, goes beyond the human experience because our eyes work like conventional cameras.

I'm a relentless sketcher. It goes back to how you process the world around you - the whole left-brain, right-brain thing. Some people are data-driven. I've always been more visual.

You see the Paper Bois - easy. Personas are easy to touch and see and digest. But you don't get the chance to really see who the Alfreds are. I want to make sure I did that with him.

Humans are generally much trickier to draw because we're so used to looking at and analyzing human faces. The slightest tweak makes a huge difference in how we perceive that character.

Many people see my early work simply as portraits of black and brown people. Really, it's an investigation of how we see those people and how they have been perceived over time.

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

I see through my eyes; the camera is just a machine to record it for me.