I’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.
BEN SHAHNAn 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.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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It may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.
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Form is the shape of content.
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It is the mission of art to remind man from time to time that he is human, and the time is ripe, just now, today, for such a reminder.
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Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
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I was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own sake or a still life or anything like that.
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If you’re going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art.
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The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.
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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
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Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material… so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.
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I was brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.
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It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.
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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 believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
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I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.
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The apprehension of… values is intuitive; but it is not a built-in intuition, not something with which one is born. Intuition in art is actually the result of… prolonged tuition.
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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 love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
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The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man’s loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
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How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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It is not the how of painting but the why. To imitate a style would be a little like teaching a tone of voice or a personality.
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Personal style, be it that of Michelangelo, or that of Tintoretto… has always been that peculiar personal rapport which has developed between an artist and his medium.
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It is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and his painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it receives its shape and form.
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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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Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.
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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.
BEN SHAHN