Chuck Close Quotes

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

I stick the collages on the wall and, if I still like them after a month or two, I make a painting.

When I make a picture, I make love.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Art is something that opens up and enhances your emotions and that's what I like to think I'm doing.

Art has been good for my soul. And it's been good for my brain. I think I'm a better painter now than I was a musician growing up. You struggle to see things and translate an image through your hands to a canvas.

There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite - getting something down.

Once I make a picture, I never look at it again.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

I paint a slice of life, whatever it is that day.

I think most people see drawing as subservient to the subject, a sort of meditation, a studying, a searching observation, in my case, for its own sake.

Most artists don't understand what they do, and I don't think we have to. Other people do that better - they understand what I do better than I do!

People assume that a self-portrait is narcissistic and you're trying to reveal something about yourself: fantasies or autobiographical information. In fact, none of my work is about me or my private life.

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

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

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.

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying, "Did you really intend for these things to be so dumb? You just put it there and took a picture of it." He wouldn't let it go. So that's what made me think about the dumbness aspect more.

As far as the surface is concerned - oil on canvas, conventionally applied - my pictures have little to do with the original photograph. They are totally painting (whatever that may mean). On the other hand, they are so like the photograph that the thing that distinguished the photograph from all other pictures remains intact.

Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.

In the end, the gesture of painting becomes almost meditative, like a ritual.

I look at the artistic process as like experiencing the world, channeling it through your personality and sending it back out there. That's the process.