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 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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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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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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Form is the shape of content.
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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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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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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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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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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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How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
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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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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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All art is based on non-conformity.
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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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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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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’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.
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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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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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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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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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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 believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
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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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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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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 love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
BEN SHAHN