The moving toward one’s inner self is a long pilgrimage for a painter. It offers many temporary successes and high points, but impels him on toward the more adequate image.
BEN SHAHNAll art is based on non-conformity.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
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I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
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I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
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Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority and its own enlightenment.
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The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
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An ametuer is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
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Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.
BEN SHAHN -
An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.
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All art is based on nonconformity … Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.
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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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Form is the shape of content.
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The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.
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Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.
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If one has set for himself the position that his painting shall not misconstrue his personal mode of thinking, then he must be rather alert to just what he does think.
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I’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.
BEN SHAHN