Ben Shahn Quotes

The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it's the film or painting and drawing, which has been a big part of my life, for a long time.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don't know what to say about what I paint, really.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.

I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is, the material thing called a painting - is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.

What does a painter do? You get a painting, you put some intent and passion and emotion into these things, and hope the people will receive it. Same as a playwright. It's art.

If I feel a painting I'm working on doesn't have imagery or emotion, I paint it out and work over it until it does.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

The idea of being close to where pigments were mined - that's the first thing in making a painting, getting the material. And what's the last thing you do in making a painting? You put a frame around it.

I go through the arc of a relationship with every single painting that I do.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Everything I do, it's a bit painterly. I like being surrounded by objects, mostly on paper. I like the images. I like the painting. I like good photography. It's something that makes me an emotional connection, and I feel comfortable around it.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

I don't think you can lightly paint a picture. It's an activity I take very seriously.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.