Chuck Close Quotes

We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

I go and see anything that's visually new, any technology that's about picture-making. The technology won't make the pictures different, but someone using it will.

I have to experiment with methods and I'm trying to find an authentic way of making an equivalent of the living, breathing person within the limits of a single picture.

One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he [the artist] can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out.

Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

Photography is simultaneously and instantaneously the recognition of a fact and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that express and signify that fact

If you can talk about it, why paint it?

There's a kind of slowness and inefficiency about rendering text in paint. We're in a world that's very fast, so things that slow you for a minute-give you pause-are good.

Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves.

Images are really powerful. People fall in love with images, and as a way of falling in love with someone because they're like an image.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

A photograph is not an accident - is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative.

Has your drawing the meaning you saw in the model at first?

To convey in the print the feeling you experienced when you exposed your film – to walk out of the darkroom and say: ‘This is it, the equivalent of what I saw and felt!’. That’s what it’s all about.

Working with the kind of talent that I've gotten to work with, like the cast of Sin City, it makes me think probably more fully dimensionally about what is going on behind their eyes. But I draw the way I draw, and ain't nothing gonna change that. Although, I draw Marv and I think, "Boy, I could throw a little Mickey [Rourke] in there."

I didn't give any instruction to the video, because it was a new medium. I didn't know what to tell him; it was so young. I did the piece and immediately after the piece, I wanted to see the material.

Allowing artist-illustrators to control the design and content of statistical graphics is almost like allowing typographers to control the content, style, and editing of prose.

Those who are not conversant in works of art are often surprised at the high value set by connoisseurs on drawings which appear careless, and in every respect unfinished; but they are truly valuable... they give the idea of a whole.