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 SHAHNForms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material… so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
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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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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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All art is based on non-conformity.
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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
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Form is the shape of content.
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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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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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Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
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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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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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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
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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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Of course I realize that photography is not the technical facility as much as it is the eye, and this decision that one makes for the moment at which you are going to snap, you know.
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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.
BEN SHAHN