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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.

Ben Shahn

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

Eye Representation Vision Visual
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
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.
BEN SHAHN

Decision Eye Photography
Form is the shape of content.
BEN SHAHN

Content Form Shapes
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.
BEN SHAHN

Desire Pregnancy United States
I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
BEN SHAHN

Choices Felt Mediums Photography
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.
BEN SHAHN

Art Born Intuition
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
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.
BEN SHAHN

Affair Paint Painting Shapes Telling
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.
BEN SHAHN

Art Essence Matter
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 SHAHN

Lifetime Planting Recent Youngster
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.
BEN SHAHN

Art Imagine Individuality
The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man’s loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
BEN SHAHN

Art Hate Men Revelation
Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
BEN SHAHN

Artist Being Life Live

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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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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Popular Authors

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