The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.
BEN SHAHNThe 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.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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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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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Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
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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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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
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Art almost always has its ingredient of impudence, its flouting of established authority, so that it may substitute its own authority and its own enlightenment.
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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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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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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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Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
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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 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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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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I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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Form is the shape of content.
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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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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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A youngster told me recently that he was going to give himself a year to see if he has talent. A year! It takes a lifetime to see if you have it. Painting is total engagement.
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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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We tried to present the ordinary in an extraordinary manner. But that’s the paradox because the only thing extraordinary about it was that it was so ordinary.
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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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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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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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The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
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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.
BEN SHAHN