Chuck Close Quotes

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

My work isn't about form. It's about seeing.

Photographs don't 'reveal' much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.

Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.

The thing is that when you don't carry a camera, that's when you see pictures in particular, or at least that's when you think you see pictures in particular. When you do carry it, if you do see one on the occasion that you do, you can take it.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

If you're really in the process of photographing, you are absolutely aware. You are looking.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

There isn't any art until some creature sees and consumes it. And has a reaction.

To look is one thing, to see is another thing; to see is very difficult, normally; to look is to try to see. I have looked and I hope I have seen.

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.

When you use the language of 'fact checking' to talk about a film, I think you're sort of fundamentally misunderstanding how art works. You don't fact check Monet's 'Water Lilies.' That's not what water lilies look like; that's what the sensation of experiencing water lilies feel like. That's the goal of the piece.

When I take a picture I take 10 percent of what I see.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

At the core, every artist, no matter what his subject matter happens to be, has to be someone doing the looking. I began to really interrogate the act of looking.

I like it when one is not certain what one sees. When we do not know why the photographer has taken a picture and when we do not know why we are looking at it, all of a sudden we discover something that we start seeing. I like this confusion.

I like to think of an image as different from a photo.

What appears on the screen is what people see. Everything else is just interpretation.

Art is the microscope of the mind, which sharpens the wit as the other does the sight; and converts every object into a little universe in itself. Art may be said to draw aside the veil from nature. To those who are perfectly unskilled in the practice, unimbued with the principles of art, most objects present only a confused mass.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.