Chuck Close Painting Quotations

I didn't want a model in the room for three or four months. It would drive me crazy, drive them crazy. But also, they gain weight, they lose weight, their hair gets long, they cut it short, they're awake, they're asleep. And a painting becomes the mean average of all those conditions. I simply looked at photography as a way to jot down the information.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.

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

Paintings can make you cry and it's just **colored dirt**.

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.

No one was more surprised than me when my paintings started selling, except maybe my dealer.