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 SHAHNPaint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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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Form is the shape of content.
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We tried to present the ordinary in an extraordinary manner. But that’s the paradox because the only thing extraordinary about it was that it was so ordinary.
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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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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
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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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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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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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How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
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A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward.
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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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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 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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The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man’s loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
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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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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 brought in, not in the photographic department at all, I was brought in on a thing called Special Skills. I was to do posters, pamphlets, murals, propaganda in general, you know.
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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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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.
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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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I love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
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Now, when I came on to Washington to begin my job, I was so interested in photography at that time that I really would have preferred to work with Stryker than with my department, which was more artistic if you wish.
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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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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.
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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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The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.
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