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 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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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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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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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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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.
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Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it’s called documentary, which I suppose is all right … We just took pictures that cried out to be taken.
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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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I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
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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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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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I’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.
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An 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.
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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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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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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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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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The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
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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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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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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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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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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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The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.
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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.
BEN SHAHN