Chuck Close Quotes

The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

The world will see many fashions of art and most of the world will follow the fashions and make none. These cults - these 'movements' - are absolutely necessary, or at any rate their causes are, for somewhere in their centres are the ones who bear the Idea, the ones who have questioned, 'But what do I think?' and 'How shall I say it best?

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

I who have been involved with all styles of painting can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion which carry the snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same.

Art changes all the time, but it never "improves." It may go down, or up, but it never improves as technology and medicine improve.

No doubt, it is useful for an artist to know all the forms of art which have preceded or which accompany his. That is a sign of strength if it is a question of looking for a stimulus or recognizing mistakes he must avoid.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle - more like music and less like sculpture - and above all it promises color. If only it keeps this promise.

I do not think my painting has ever been revolutionary. It was not directed against any kind of painting. I have never wanted to prove that I was right and someone else wrong.

If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they "artialize" nature.

I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, "I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child." I think that's what art is about.

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.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

Imitation of the art of earlier centuries, as that done by Picasso and Modigliani , is carried on not to perpetuate ancient values but to demonstrate that new aesthetic orders now prevail.

When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.

Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

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

Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.

I'm a huge fan of David Hockney. I love the way he keeps reinventing himself.

If they were starting their careers today, Rockwell and Picasso would probably both be painting on black velvet.