Chuck Close

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.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

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.

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.

I'm very learning-disabled, and I think it drove me to what I'm doing.

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.

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.

The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.

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

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.