Chuck Close Quotes

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.

What is bad painting? Picabia made some deliberately bad paintings, but they were by him, so great in a way.

In the arts the way in which an idea is rendered, and the manner in which it is expressed, is much more important than the idea itself.

Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence.

'What is this', and 'How is this done?' are the first two questions to ask of any work of art. The second question immediately illuminates the first, but it often doesn't get asked. Perhaps it sounds too technical. Perhaps it sounds pedestrian.

Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.

To say of a picture, as is often said in its praise, that it shows great and earnest labour, is to say that it is incomplete and unfit for view.

If we talk about art in general... all the works of art, each one of them could reflect a moment in the history of mankind, the time in which it was created.

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

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

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.

Arguments against photography ever being considered a fine art are: the element of chance which enters in, — finding things ready-made for a machine to record, and of course the mechanics of the medium. I say that chance enters into all branches of art.

Modern pictures banish depiction for interfering with the workings of paint.

Look, it's my misery that I have to paint this kind of painting, it's your misery that you have to love it, and the price of the misery is thirteen hundred and fifty dollars.

The brush is a more powerful and rapid tool than the point or the stump... the main thing that the brush secures is the instant grasp of the grand construction of a figure.

If you reduce sculpture to the flat plane of the photograph, you're passing on only a residue of your concerns... You're not only reducing the sculpture to a different scale for the purposes of consumption, but you're denying the real content of the work.

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.

When a painter is working he is aware of the means which are available to him - these include his materials, the style he inherits, the conventions he must obey, his prescribed or freely chosen subject matter - as constituting both an opportunity and a restraint.

I don't try to force-feed it or put any things on the images until I'm making a painting. It's not photorealism. Photorealism's goal is to reproduce a photograph. The best photorealism can't beat a printer, and I have a really nice printer. I don't want to go blind doing what a printer can do.

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.

I've had a period of drawing on canvas in black - with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing - and the kids who think it simple to splash a 'Pollock' out.

Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.

I’ve learnt from experience that a painting isn’t finished when you put down your brush – that’s when it starts. The public reaction is what supplies meaning and value. Art comes alive in the arguments you have about it.

grievance does not make for great art.

For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.