Chuck Close Painting Quotations

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

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.

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.

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

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

All the fingerprint paintings are done without a grid.