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 lightening 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.

— Chuck Close

Chuck Close Quotes

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.

— Chuck Close

I’m poor white trash from the state of Washington.

— Chuck Close

I always thought problem solving was greatly overrated – and that the most important thing was problem creation.

— Chuck Close

All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.

— Chuck Close

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.

— Chuck Close

Any innovation that is evident in my paintings is a direct result of something that happened in the course of making a print.

— Chuck Close

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.

— Chuck Close

I absolutely hate technology, and I’m computer illiterate, and I never use any labor-saving devices although I’m not convinced that a computer is a labor-saving device.

— Chuck Close

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.

— Chuck Close

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.

— Chuck Close

I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.

— Chuck Close

Every idea occurs while you are working. If you are sitting around waiting for inspiration, you could sit there forever.

— Chuck Close

Get 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.

— Chuck Close

Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don’t get a photograph that I want to work from.

— Chuck Close

I’m plagued with indecision in my life. I can’t figure out what to order in a restaurant.

— Chuck Close

Those who are waiting for an epiphany to strike may wait forever. The artist simply goes to work, making art, both good and not so good.

— Chuck Close

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

— Chuck Close

I learned you could suffer a terrible tragedy and still be happy again.

— Chuck Close

If it looks like art, chances are it’s somebody else’s art.

— Chuck Close

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.

— Chuck Close
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