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

Ben Shahn

If you’re going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art.
BEN SHAHN

Art Giving Years
I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
BEN SHAHN

Artist Believe Label
It may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.
BEN SHAHN

Bearing Concept Degree Newness Number Possible
Form is the shape of content.
BEN SHAHN

Content Form Shapes
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.
BEN SHAHN

Ideas Pronounce Thinking Weight
Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.
BEN SHAHN

Blood Reputation War
I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.
BEN SHAHN

Found Photography Sketching
To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
BEN SHAHN

Abstract Essence Matter
The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
BEN SHAHN

Eye Representation Vision Visual
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.
BEN SHAHN

Personality Teaching Voice
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.
BEN SHAHN

Mode Painting Personal Thinking
I’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.
BEN SHAHN

Artist Differences Sunday
Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
BEN SHAHN

Art Imagine Individuality
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.
BEN SHAHN

Art Enlightenment May Substitute
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?
BEN SHAHN

Artist Celebrate Fall Lines Neighbour
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.
BEN SHAHN

Saturday Something Time Wife Work

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

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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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