A biography for Chuck Closehasn’t been written yet.
“Women in general interest me. I like how women are more liable to talk about real things, personal things.”
“All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you're in trouble.”
“I'm poor white trash from the state of Washington.”
“I only have so much time and energy and money, and I'm going to put it into my work.”
“I don't work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.”
“The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.”
“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.”
“Amateurs look for inspiration the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“No one was more surprised than me when my paintings started selling, except maybe my dealer.”
“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.”