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.
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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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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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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I confess that Roy [Stryker] was a little bit dictatorial in his editing and he ruined quite a number of my pictures, which he stopped doing later. He used to punch a hole through a negative. Some of them were incredibly valuable. He didn’t understand at the time.
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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.
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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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The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
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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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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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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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Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
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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 love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
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All art is based on non-conformity.
BEN SHAHN