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.
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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Form is the shape of content.
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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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All art is based on nonconformity … Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.
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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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I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.
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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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How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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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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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?
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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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The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
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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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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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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.
BEN SHAHN