Ben Shahn Quotes

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

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.

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.

I love chaos.... It's the poetic element in a dull and ordered world.

Being an artist is not only what you do, but how you live your life.

Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel.

The artist must operate on the assumption that the public consists in the highest order of individual; that he is civilized, cultured, and highly sensitive both to emotional and intellectual contexts. And while the whole public most certainly does not consist in that sort of individual, still the tendency of art is to create such a public - to lift the level of perceptivity, to increase and enrich the average individual's store of values... I believe that it is in a certain devotion to concepts of truth that we discover values.

If you're going to be an artist, all life is your subject. And all your experience is part of your art. 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.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.

The values that reside in art are anarchic, they are every man's loves and hates and his momentary divine revelation.

Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists.

Form is the shape of content.

The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The popular eye is not untrained; it is only wrongly trained - trained by inferior and insincere visual representations.

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?

The natural reaction of the artist will be strongly towards bringing man back into focus as the center of importance.

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.

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. 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.

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.

All art is based on non-conformity.