{"id":14427,"date":"2015-01-21T11:55:48","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T16:55:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/?p=14427"},"modified":"2015-01-21T11:55:48","modified_gmt":"2015-01-21T16:55:48","slug":"47-quotes-by-photographer-chuck-close","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/14427\/47-quotes-by-photographer-chuck-close\/","title":{"rendered":"47 Quotes By Photographer Chuck Close"},"content":{"rendered":"

 
\nHere\u2019s a collection of my favorite quotes by artist Chuck Close<\/a>.
\n\u201cI don’t work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cInspiration 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cThe 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.\u201d \u2015 Chuck Close
\n\u201cYou 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cI\u2019m 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cI was never one of those people who had to have a perfect situation to paint in. I can make art anywhere, anytime \u2014 it doesn\u2019t matter. I mean, I know so many artists for whom having the perfect space is somehow essential. They spend years designing, building, outfitting the perfect space, and then when it is just about time to get to work they\u2019ll sell that place and build another one. It seems more often than not a way to keep from having to work. But I could paint anywhere. I made big paintings in the tiniest bedrooms, garages, you name it. you know, once I have my back to the room, I could be anywhere.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cOn a typical country day I am painting by nine, and I usually work until noon. Three hours in the morning. I will have lunch either at my desk, or if it\u2019s nice I will go to the pool. Of if it\u2019s really nice I will go to the beach for an hour. Have lunch on the beach perhaps, and then I come back and I paint from one to four, another three hours, and about then the light is failing, and I am beginning to fuck up. So then my nurse usually comes at four, and I stop working, clean up, have a big drink, and that\u2019s a typical day. I work every day out there, every single day.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cEvery idea occurs while you are working. If you are sitting around waiting for inspiration, you could sit there forever.\u201d \u2015 Chuck Close
\n\u201cAll the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cFar more interesting than problem solving is problem creation.\u201d \u2015 Chuck Close
\n\u201cSee, I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to [participate in] \u2018problem creation\u2019 \u2026 You know, ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you\u2019ll find yourself all by your lonesome \u2014 which I think is a more interesting place to be.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cGet yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don’t have the answers. And if you don’t have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else’s solutions will seem appropriate. You’ll have to come up with your own.\u201d \u2015 Chuck Close
\n\u201cNever let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cIf it looks like art, chances are it’s somebody else’s art.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cI am going for a level of perfection that is only mine… Most of the pleasure is in getting the last little piece perfect.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cPhotography 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cA 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cWhat 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cThe first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter – 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cSometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don’t get a photograph that I want to work from.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cA 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cI 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cI 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cThere 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cI\u2019m very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cPainting is the frozen evidence of a performance.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cPainting 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cPainting is a lie. It’s the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cPart 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cI 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cIt’s always a pleasure to talk about someone else’s work.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cIn my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cI build a painting by putting little marks together \u2013 some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cI 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cI can’t always reach the image in my mind… almost never, in fact… so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cThere’s something Zen-like about the way I work – it’s like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cI 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cEase is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you’re in trouble.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cYou 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cIt doesn’t upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cI think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cMost 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cThe 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.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cIn life you can be dealt a winning hand of cards and you can find a way to lose, and you can be dealt a losing hand and find a way to win. True in art and true in life: you pretty much make your own destiny. If you are by nature an optimistic person, which I am, that puts you in a better position to be lucky in life.\u201d \u2015 Chuck Close
\n\u201cLike any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me. It all ends up being my work, the corporate me, but everyone extends ideas and comes up with suggestions.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cIf the bottom dropped out of the market and the artist was not going to sell anything, he or she will keep working, and the dealer will keep trying to find some way to convince somebody to buy this stuff.\u201d – Chuck Close
\n\u201cArt saved my life\u201d \u2015 Chuck Close
\nFind the book Chuck Close Photographer here<\/span><\/a>.<\/strong><\/span>
\nExplore\u00a0The Essential Collection\u00a0of Quotes By Photographers here. <\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span>
\nView The Essential Collection\u00a0Of Photographers Documentaries\u00a0here.<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span>
\n 
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Here\u2019s a collection of my favorite quotes by artist Chuck Close. \u201cI don’t work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.\u201d – Chuck Close \u201cInspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it’s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[3202],"tags":[2292,1249,56],"post_folder":[],"yoast_head":"\n47 Quotes By Photographer Chuck Close - John Paul Caponigro<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/14427\/47-quotes-by-photographer-chuck-close\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"47 Quotes By Photographer Chuck Close - John Paul Caponigro\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"  Here\u2019s a collection of my favorite quotes by artist Chuck Close. \u201cI don’t work with inspiration. 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