Ben Shahn Quotes
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.
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.
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.
The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.
Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.
The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.
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.
Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material... so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.
I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.
The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained - trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.
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.
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.
Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.
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.
The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man's loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.
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.
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.
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.
An amateur 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.
