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.
BEN SHAHNI’ve been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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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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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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 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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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 love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.
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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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An amateur artist is one who works all week at something else so he can paint on Saturday and Sunday. A professional artist is one whose wife works so he can paint all the time.
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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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Form is the shape of content.
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Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.
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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
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The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.
BEN SHAHN