Ben Shahn
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.Collection: Shapes
All art is based on non-conformity.Collection: Art
I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Thinking
Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material... so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Artist
Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.Collection: Art
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; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Numbers
How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.Collection: Sky
I've been asked often what is the difference between an amateur and a professional artist, and I will tell you. 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.Collection: Sunday