Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material… so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.
BEN SHAHNThe popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained – trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
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A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward.
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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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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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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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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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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
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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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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.
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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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To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.
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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 became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.
BEN SHAHN