If you’re going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art.
BEN SHAHNEach 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.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
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All art is based on non-conformity.
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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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Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
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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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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 became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.
BEN SHAHN