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.
BEN SHAHNIt 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.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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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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 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 believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
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How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
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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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Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.
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It is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and his painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it receives its shape and form.
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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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I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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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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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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I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.
BEN SHAHN