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.
BEN SHAHNWhen 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.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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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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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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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Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
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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 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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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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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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All art is based on non-conformity.
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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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The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
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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.
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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 love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
BEN SHAHN