Chuck Close Quotes

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

I think that has been a benefit to me because I think most people understand quilts and not a lot of people understand paintings. But yet they're looking at one.

Ironically, my paintings don't photograph well.

All bronzes are made to be touched. Bronze is a sensual 'living' material. The sweat and oil of your palms adds to the patination.

Painting gives the object itself; poetry what it implies. Painting embodies what a thing contains in itself; poetry suggests what exists out of it, in any manner connected with it.

It could be that people want to consume sculpture the way they consume paintings - through photographs... I'm interested in the experience of sculpture in the place where it resides.

My drawings are the result of my sculpture.

Many great works of art have only form, the sculpture of the thing. Color as used to signify realization by men like Titian and Rembrandt, gives greater life and tactile experience to the work.

I believe that when you go into a gallery or a museum, the most powerful pieces are the ones that don't have the words in the corner that distract you from the larger piece.

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

Sculptures permit me to create real volume One can touch the forms, one can give them smoothness, the sensuality that one wants.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

What a crippling art writing is, no body to it, no craft, really. It's all in the mind and you never see it or feel it -- only sometimes hear it. It uses only such a small part of man. I wish I were a sculptor.

The picture that approaches sculpture nearest Is the best picture.

It is all very well for people with fine arts degrees, but for ordinary people like myself, we want a statue to look like the person.

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

In my opinion painting should be considered excellent in proportion as it approaches the effect of relief, while relief should be considered bad in proportion as it approaches the effect of painting.

People think one-point and two-point perspective is how the world actually looks, but of course, it isn't. It's a convention.

We may call painting the grandchild of nature.

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of a person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.

The painting is always conceived as the linear record of a rhythmic gesture: it is a graph of a dance executed by the hand. Not only the artist's eye and hand perform this dance, so does the eye of the beholder.

I'm sure that the camera is part of European art.

The space between the dish and the pitcher, that I paint also.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.