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47 Quotes By Photographer Chuck Close

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Here’s a collection of my favorite quotes by artist Chuck Close.
“I don’t work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.” – Chuck Close
“Inspiration is highly overrated. If you sit around and wait for the clouds to part, it’s not liable to ever happen. More often than not, work is salvation.” – Chuck Close
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.” ― Chuck Close
“You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.” – Chuck Close
“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.” – Chuck Close
“I was never one of those people who had to have a perfect situation to paint in. I can make art anywhere, anytime — it doesn’t matter. I mean, I know so many artists for whom having the perfect space is somehow essential. They spend years designing, building, outfitting the perfect space, and then when it is just about time to get to work they’ll sell that place and build another one. It seems more often than not a way to keep from having to work. But I could paint anywhere. I made big paintings in the tiniest bedrooms, garages, you name it. you know, once I have my back to the room, I could be anywhere.” – Chuck Close
“On a typical country day I am painting by nine, and I usually work until noon. Three hours in the morning. I will have lunch either at my desk, or if it’s nice I will go to the pool. Of if it’s really nice I will go to the beach for an hour. Have lunch on the beach perhaps, and then I come back and I paint from one to four, another three hours, and about then the light is failing, and I am beginning to fuck up. So then my nurse usually comes at four, and I stop working, clean up, have a big drink, and that’s a typical day. I work every day out there, every single day.” – Chuck Close
“Every idea occurs while you are working. If you are sitting around waiting for inspiration, you could sit there forever.” ― Chuck Close
“All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.” – Chuck Close
“Far more interesting than problem solving is problem creation.” ― Chuck Close
“See, I think our whole society is much too problem-solving oriented. It is far more interesting to [participate in] ‘problem creation’ … You know, ask yourself an interesting enough question and your attempt to find a tailor-made solution to that question will push you to a place where, pretty soon, you’ll find yourself all by your lonesome — which I think is a more interesting place to be.” – Chuck Close
“Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don’t have the answers. And if you don’t have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else’s solutions will seem appropriate. You’ll have to come up with your own.” ― Chuck Close
“Never let anyone define what you are capable of by using parameters that don’t apply to you.” – Chuck Close
“If it looks like art, chances are it’s somebody else’s art.” – Chuck Close
“I am going for a level of perfection that is only mine… Most of the pleasure is in getting the last little piece perfect.” – Chuck Close
“Photography is the easiest medium with which to be merely competent. Almost anybody can be competent. It’s the hardest medium in which to have some sort of personal vision and to have a signature style.” – Chuck Close
“A photograph doesn’t gain weight or lose weight, or change from being happy to being sad. It’s frozen. You can use it, then recycle it.” – Chuck Close
“What difference does it make whether you’re looking at a photograph or looking at a still life in front of you? You still have to look.” – Chuck Close
“The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter – 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.” – Chuck Close
“Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don’t get a photograph that I want to work from.” – Chuck Close
“A face is a road map of someone’s life. Without any need to amplify that or draw attention to it, there’s a great deal that’s communicated about who this person is and what their life experiences have been.” – Chuck Close
“I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don’t recognize faces, so I’m sure it’s what drove me to portraits in the first place.” – Chuck Close
“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.” – Chuck Close
“There are so many artists that are dyslexic or learning disabled, it’s just phenomenal. There’s also an unbelievably high proportion of artists who are left-handed, and a high correlation between left-handedness and learning disabilities.” – Chuck Close
“I’m very interested in how we read things, especially the link between seeing two-dimensional and three-dimensional images, because of how I read.” – Chuck Close
“Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.” – Chuck Close
“Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.” – Chuck Close
“Painting is a lie. It’s the most magic of all media, the most transcendent. It makes space where there is no space.” – Chuck Close
“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.” – Chuck Close
“I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.” – Chuck Close
“It’s always a pleasure to talk about someone else’s work.” – Chuck Close
“In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.” – Chuck Close
“I build a painting by putting little marks together – some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.” – Chuck Close
“I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person. You can make something that looks like a head, with fewer dots, but you won’t be able to give much information about who it is.” – Chuck Close
“I can’t always reach the image in my mind… almost never, in fact… so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.” – Chuck Close
“There’s something Zen-like about the way I work – it’s like raking gravel in a Zen Buddhist garden.” – Chuck Close
“I knew from the age of five what I wanted to do. The one thing I could do was draw. I couldn’t draw that much better than some of the other kids, but I cared more and I wanted it badly.” – Chuck Close
“Ease is the enemy of the artist. When things get too easy, you’re in trouble.” – 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.” – Chuck Close
“It doesn’t upset artists to find out that artists used lenses or mirrors or other aids, but it certainly does upset the art historians.” – Chuck Close
“I think the problem with the arts in America is how unimportant it seems to be in our educational system.” – Chuck Close
“Most people are good at too many things. And when you say someone is focused, more often than not what you actually mean is they’re very narrow.” – Chuck Close
“The reason I don’t like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever, is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real.” – Chuck Close
“In life you can be dealt a winning hand of cards and you can find a way to lose, and you can be dealt a losing hand and find a way to win. True in art and true in life: you pretty much make your own destiny. If you are by nature an optimistic person, which I am, that puts you in a better position to be lucky in life.” ― Chuck Close
“Like any corporation, I have the benefit of the brainpower of everyone who is working for me. It all ends up being my work, the corporate me, but everyone extends ideas and comes up with suggestions.” – Chuck Close
“If the bottom dropped out of the market and the artist was not going to sell anything, he or she will keep working, and the dealer will keep trying to find some way to convince somebody to buy this stuff.” – Chuck Close
“Art saved my life” ― Chuck Close
Find the book Chuck Close Photographer here.
Explore The Essential Collection of Quotes By Photographers here.
View The Essential Collection Of Photographers Documentaries here.
 
 

See Color In New Ways With Photoshop’s Gradient Maps

Magazine - Digital Photo Pro  Comment
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Whether used subtly or dramatically, Photoshop’s Gradient Map color adjustment tool can open up new ways of seeing and working with color for any artist. Photoshop’s Gradient Map assigns new colors to existing brightness values. With it, you can enhance existing colors, transfer colors from one image to another or create entirely new color relationships. It can be wild!
The Gradient Map interface looks difficult to use, but with a few pointers, you’ll find it surprisingly easy to use. While you can apply a Gradient Map directly to a layer (Images > Adjustments > Gradient Map), I recommend you apply Gradient Maps as adjustment layers (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map) to take advantage of both the greater flexibility and control you’ll gain over the final effect.
Once activated, there are a number of default presets you can experiment with, but it’s most likely that you’ll want to create your own. Simply click on an existing gradient in the Properties panel to activate the Gradient Editor. Click New. Click at the bottom of the gradient to add new colors. A pointer will appear; double-click it or the Color box to choose a color. You can move the pointer to direct the color into different tonal values. (Move left to target darker values and right to target lighter values. Alternately, enter a new number in the Location field.) The diamonds left and right of it will control how each color fades into surrounding colors. You can add dozens of different pointers/colors, but for most applications, I recommend you restrain yourself to as few as possible. You can delete a pointer/color by clicking on it and clicking Delete or by pressing the Delete key. When you create an effect you’d like to use more than once, type a Name and click Save; you can easily store, retrieve and share these GRD files.
The color effects you can generate with the Gradient Map are so powerful and so varied, you simply must spend a little time experimenting with it to truly understand both how far you can go and how subtle you can get. Consider this kind of visual research time well spent.
After you’re done experimenting, then it’s time to deliver. Working with the Gradient Map often takes a little finessing. You’re likely to be a little disappointed if you try and get the perfect colors with the Gradient Map alone. You can spend a great deal of time picking and re-picking colors until you get it just right. Instead, try working more broadly, getting close to a desired effect and then fine-tuning the results.
Read details on how to do this on Digital Photo Pro.
Once you’ve mastered the interface, the real challenge begins—visualizing color possibilities. Previsualization can only go so far; instead, use software as a tool for visualization. Instead of rushing to a single finished result, I prefer to work on multiple copies of an image to make side-by-side comparisons of a set of variations. The possibilities are seemingly so limitless that you must perform experiments to find the best solution. If your experiments are both targeted and iterative, you’ll generate many solutions that are more likely to be optimum.
Here, a little color theory can be useful. Use dark colors in shadows and light colors in highlights; otherwise, you may posterize or solarize. Use analogous colors (similar color families) to create transitions; transitions between complementary colors tend to get muddy. Variations on earth tones work well for both realistic and antique effects. Variations on warm colors can add intensity, even fire. Variations on cool colors can generate nocturnal and even aquatic effects.
Photoshop’s Gradient Map is an exotic color adjustment tool that can be a real game changer. If you truly understand the possibilities this tool opens up, you’ll have learned to see in new ways. What could be more valuable?
Read more at Digital Photo Pro.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

43 Quotes On Innovation

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Enjoy this collection of my favorite quotes on innovation.
“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” — Theodore Levitt
“Innovation is creativity with a job to do.” – John Emmerling
“Imagination plus innovation equals realization.” – Denis Waitley
“Ideas are useless unless used.” – T. Levitt
“Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.” – Alfred North Whitehead
“To accomplish great things we must dream as well as act.” – Anatole France
“You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” – Lee Iaccocca
“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” – William Pollard
“Mindless habitual behavior is the enemy of innovation.” – Rosabeth Moss Kanter
“One of the challenges of innovation is figuring out how to wipe your mind clean about what you should be doing at any given moment, and not having a religious attachment to what’s gotten you there thus far.” – Andrew Mason
“Everybody believes in innovation until they see it. Then they think, ‘Oh, no; that’ll never work. It’s too different.’” – Nolan Bushnell
“Innovation is hard. It really is. Because most people don’t get it. Remember, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, these were all considered toys at their introduction because they had no constituency. They were too new.” – Nolan Bushnell
“The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.” – Kevin Kelly
“An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.” – Max Planck
“For better or worse, that is true with any new innovation, certainly any new technological innovation. There’s many good things that come out of it, but also some bad things. All you can do is try to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff.” – Steve Case
“We seem to forget that innovation doesn’t just come from equations or new kinds of chemicals, it comes from a human place. Innovation in the sciences is always linked in some way, either directly or indirectly, to a human experience.” – John Maeda
“For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.” – Margaret Heffernan
“Innovation is all about people. Innovation thrives when the population is diverse, accepting and willing to cooperate.” – Vivek Wadhwa
“Societies advance through innovation every bit as much as economies do.” – Geoff Mulgan
“If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.” – Steven Johnson
“Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.” – Bill Gates
“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” – Steve Jobs
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” – Steve Jobs
“You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.” – Larry Page
“Most companies don’t have the luxury of focusing exclusively on innovation. They have to innovate while stamping out zillions of widgets or processing billions of transactions.” – Gary Hamel
“I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.” – Jeff Bezos
“Innovation is the ability to convert ideas into invoices.” – L Duncan
“Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.” – Michael Porter
“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.” – Peter Drucker
“The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present the decline will be fast.” – Peter Drucker
“Do you know what my favorite renewable fuel is? An ecosystem for innovation.” – Thomas Friedman
“Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.” – Bill Gates
“Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.” – Jill Lepore
“A key ingredient in innovation is the ability to challenge authority and break rules.” – Vivek Wadhwa
“Innovation is the whim of an elite before it becomes a need of the public.” – Ludwig von Mises
“Innovation, being avant garde, is always polemic.” – Ferran Adria
“We must not confuse distortion with innovation; distortion is useless change, art is beneficial change.” – Chuck Jones
“Creative experimentation propels our culture forward. That our stories of innovation tend to glorify the breakthroughs and edit out all the experimental mistakes doesn’t mean that mistakes play a trivial role. As any artist or scientist knows, without some protected, even sacred space for mistakes, innovation would cease.” – Evgeny Morozov
“Innovation almost always is not successful the first time out. You try something and it doesn’t work and it takes confidence to say we haven’t failed yet … Ultimately you become commercially successful.” – Clayton Christensen
“There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.” – Brene Brown
“Pure innovation is more gross than error.” – George Chapman
“We owe our existence to innovation. Our species exists thanks to four billion years of genetic innovation.” – Gary Hamel
“Time is the greatest innovator.” — Sir Francis Bacon
Find more quotes in The Essential List Of Creativity Quotes.
 

Alumnus Martyn Lucas' Exhibit Ends Of The Earth

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“Ends of the Earth is a dramatic, photographic voyage of the world’s ice caps and glaciers that depicts the magnificent beauty of the frozen landscape in large format color images.
Martyn Lucas grew up in England and was first introduced to photography by his father, a photographer who taught him composition, contrast, and how to perfectly capture a landscape.  Lucas’ natural talent for landscape photography has led him all over the world, seeing and preserving each new place through the lens of a camera.
Inspired by the Polar Regions, Lucas has quite literally travelled to the Ends of the Earth to photograph the world’s ice caps and glaciers.  These photographs, each breathtakingly beautiful, leave the viewer stunned as they are given the rare opportunity to see the vastness of Antarctica: the coldest, driest, and windiest place on Earth.  Carefully photographing the urgency of global warming and the ice melting at alarming rates, Lucas has been able to present the unseen dilemmas of the world’s climate system.
Like viewing something out of a dream, this haunting exhibition promises to deliver the extreme beauty and silence of the frozen tundra, as seen through Martyn Lucas’ artistic vision.  Each work complements the others when viewed as a whole, and yet each is a distinct work of art on its own.
The artwork of this incredible photographer is nothing short of captivating, revealing the massive size of the ice and the strong current and movement of the icy water.  Viewers are welcome to come celebrate this incredible exhibition January 10, 2015 for the opening of Ends of the Earth, located in the Bunzl Gallery.  Visitors of The Bascom also invited to Martyn Lucas’ Artist Talk and Reception Saturday, March 21, 2015 from 5 to 7 pm at The Bascom.  Experience the wonder of Martyn Lucas’ Polar Regions photography through this breathtaking assemblage of photographs. ”
For more information, please contact The Bascom at 828.526.4949 or visit www.thebascom.org.
Find out more about this exhibit here.
Find out more about Martyn Lucas here.
Read more Alumni Success Stories here.

Sean Kernan's Long Road to New York

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“A few years back the renowned choreographer and Pilobolus co-founder, Alison Chase, approached Sean Kernan to work with her on a multimedia dance/theater performance piece. She wanted to use visual technologies in ways that were new to the dance world.
Now, after 4 years of work and exploration by 7 dancers, one videographer and a composer, plus a lighting designer, and after residencies at MASS MoCA, Collins Art Center, the Garde Theater and Williams College, Drowned arrives at the Miller Theater in New York.  It’s a love story (two, actually), a story of death, resurrection and transformation. It stretches the boundaries of dance, theater, music, and multi-media to make a narrative that is mythic, violent … and beautiful.
The premiere of Drowned takes place at the Miller Theater in New York, from January 9-11, 2015. Also on the bill are the New York premieres of Red Weather and Devil Got My Woman. You can get tickets here.
Because the whole work was improvised from beginning to end, rehearsal was the most exciting part of things. Kernan, who started his working life in theater before turning to photography, made a photographic rehearsal diary that traces the creation of the work from the first meeting in his studio—where they made images and projected them onto everything, including each other—to the last working rehearsals just before Christmas. You can see a gallery of them here.”
Find out more about Sean Kernan here.
Find out about Sean Kernan’s new book Looking Into The Light here.
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