The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man’s loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
BEN SHAHNTo abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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 time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn’t have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn’t get as far as Hoboken at that time.
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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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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 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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Content may by trivial. But I do not think that any person may pronounce either upon the weight or upon the triviality of an idea before its execution.
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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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Now, when I came on to Washington to begin my job, I was so interested in photography at that time that I really would have preferred to work with Stryker than with my department, which was more artistic if you wish.
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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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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
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What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?
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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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Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
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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.
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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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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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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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I love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
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Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
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How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
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Form is the shape of content.
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A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward.
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All art is based on non-conformity.
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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.
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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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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.
BEN SHAHN