If you’re going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art.
BEN SHAHNThe values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man’s loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
More Ben Shahn Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.
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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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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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Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.
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Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.
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How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.
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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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Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
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I love chaos…. It’s the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man’s loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
BEN SHAHN -
I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.
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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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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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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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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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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.
BEN SHAHN