A face is a road map of someone's life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there's a great deal that's communicated about who this person is and what their life experiences have been.
Chuck Close
Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don't apply to you.
I'm plagued with indecision in my life. I can't figure out what to order in a restaurant.
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.
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.
Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It's the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.
I think most paintings are a record of the decisions that the artist made. I just perhaps make them a little clearer than some people have.
Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.
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.
I knew from the age of five what I wanted to do. The one thing I could do was draw. I couldn't draw that much better than some of the other kids, but I cared more and I wanted it badly.
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.
Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.
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.
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.
There's something Zen-like about the way I work - it's like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.
All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.
I'm poor white trash from the state of Washington.
My mother was a piano teacher, my father an inventor. He invented the reflective paint they still use on airstrips. They had faith in my ambition, and I think that made all the difference.
I'm very learning-disabled, and I think it drove me to what I'm doing.
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.
You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.
No one was more surprised than me when my paintings started selling, except maybe my dealer.
Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.
It doesn't upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.
I think I was driven to paint portraits to commit images of friends and family to memory. I have face blindness, and once a face is flattened out, I can remember it better.
What difference does it make whether you're looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.
The reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.
I don't work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.
I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.
I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings.
It's always a pleasure to talk about someone else's work.
I don't care about the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim isn't involved in anything that I am interested in. I don't care about motorcycles and Armani suits.
In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.
Of all the artists who emerged in the '80s, I think perhaps Cindy Sherman is the most important.
I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person. You can make something that looks like a head, with fewer dots, but you won't be able to give much information about who it is.
A photograph doesn't gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It's frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.
I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.
Most people are good at too many things. And when you say someone is focused, more often than not what you actually mean is they're very narrow.
I have a great deal of difficulty recognizing faces, especially if I haven't - if I've just met somebody, it's hopeless.
Losing my father at a tender age was extremely important in being able to accept what happened to me later when I became a quadriplegic.
Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it's not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.
Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.
Painting is a lie. It's the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.
Every child should have a chance to feel special.
The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.
Neurologically, I'm a quadriplegic, so virtually everything about my work has been driven by my learning disabilities, which are quite severe, and my lack of facial recognition, which I'm sure is what drove me to paint portraits in the first place.
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.
I'm not by nature a terribly intuitive person; I need to build a situation in which I will behave more intuitively, and that has really changed the life of my work - I found a way to trick myself into being intuitive.
You don't have to have a great art idea - just get to work and something will happen. So that's pretty much my modus operandi and pretty much my principal position, such as it is.
Any artist who goes to Las Vegas is an idiot as far as I am concerned. Whoever goes to Las Vegas can stay in Las Vegas.
