I’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.
BEN SHAHNAn ametuer is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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.
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It may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.
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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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All art is based on non-conformity.
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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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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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Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
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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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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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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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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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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 artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.
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Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
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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