Chuck Close

Artist

1940-07-05

Quotes by Chuck Close

• Amateurs look for inspiration the rest of us just get up and go to work.

  Read quote

• The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.

  Read quote

• The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case.

  Read quote

• Amateurs look for inspiration the rest of us just get up and go to work.

  Read quote

• In the 7th grade, I made a 20-foot long mural of the Lewis and Clark Trail while we were studying that in history because I knew I wasn't going to be able to spit back the names and the dates and all that stuff on a test.

  Read quote

• Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

  Read quote

• Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that's embedded in the work.

  Read quote

• Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.

  Read quote

• I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.

  Read quote

• I'm very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.

  Read quote

• There are so many artists that are dyslexic or learning disabled, it's just phenomenal. There's also an unbelievably high proportion of artists who are left-handed, and a high correlation between left-handedness and learning disabilities.

  Read quote

• I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.

  Read quote

• I don't want the viewer to be able to peel away the layers of my painting like the layers of an onion and find that all the blues are on the same level.

  Read quote

• You don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.

  Read quote

• I have no intention of flattering people. I like wrinkles and crow's feet and flaws, and somebody should know, if I'm going to photograph them, that's going to show up, you know?

  Read quote

• There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.

  Read quote