Chuck Close Quotes

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.

All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer. art is an action against death. It is a denial of death.

Why do we make records? Because we want to say something. Why are you in art? Because you want to say something. The second you don't have anything to say, you stop making art - you might start making product. And I'm interested in being an artist.

Growing up, I enjoyed drawing, but it was always in the service of an idea. I drew all the time, and I enjoyed making.

I don't know what I would've done without it. I really struggled in school with reading and writing. Art was my refuge - my way of speaking, of dealing with my own issues and connecting with the world.

I want to communicate. I do; every artist does. That's why you're an artist.

Not that painting would have been a release. The reason for doing it is the desire to create. I've got to do it! I've seen that, I can still remember it, I've got to paint it.

An artist must create. If she doesn't, she will become a menace to society.

When I'm painting and drawing I only do people. Acting is obviously portraiture - and writing is as well.

Artists need to express.

When I look at the majority of my own songs they really came from my own sense of personal confusion or need to express some pain or beauty - they were coming from a universal and personal place.

Just doing a project because it's an opportunity won't create meaning. As an artist, I need something to communicate.

The spirit can assert itself only through the medium of clear form.

I'm pretty terrible at writing, so the way I kind of therapeutically get through things is by drawing.

I was trying to be a writer, and I was kind of getting sidetracked, so I started doing cartoons as a form of expression.

When I think about how I want to reach an audience, I just wanted to make pieces that were inspired by something that gave me so much pleasure.

The idea of writing songs because you're depressed and you need to communicate it somehow, that isn't really true for me.

No, I never had any dreams. The process of art is a dream in itself. The artist just doesn't... you work out something. It's yours. You don't have to go to sleep to do that. You do that on the canvas.

Because fashion essentially is art, and as an artist and someone who is also a musician and an artist in regards to drawing and painting, anything I can do that expresses my feelings is something I'm really drawn to.

Music is the doorway that has led me to drawing, photography, and writing.

From the time I was three or four years old, I drew all the time. Drew all the time, every second.

I genuinely find the most meaningful thing I do is to make music, but also to absorb some sort of creativity.

The artist in me cries out for design.

I like the idea that paintings are not representations of an artist's psyche. Making the paintings is what gives the artist her psyche in the first place.

Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint.