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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

All art is based on non-conformity.

Ben Shahn

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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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  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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  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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  When you talk about war on poverty it doesn’t mean very much; but if you can show to some degree this sort of thing then you can show a great deal more of how people are living and a very great percentage of our people today.

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  To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

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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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  Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it’s called documentary, which I suppose is all right … We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.

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  Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.

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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 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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  Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.

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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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  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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  How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.

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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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