Chuck Close

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.

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.

It's always a pleasure to talk about someone else's work.

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.

Every child should have a chance to feel special.

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.

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 think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.

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.

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

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

I only have so much time and energy and money, and I'm going to put it into my work.