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.
BEN SHAHNPaint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
BEN SHAHN -
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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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.
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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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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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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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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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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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Form is the shape of content.
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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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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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The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
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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.
BEN SHAHN