Form is the shape of content.

All art is based on non-conformity.

I didn't care where my works were published.

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

Now, my knowledge of photography was terribly limited.

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

It's pretty hard to measure influence of written or visual material.

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

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

It used to be twelve people crowded around a sewing table; now it's ten.

I still love to look at photographs but I couldn't do it myself anymore.

How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.

I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate.

In the South or in the mine country, wherever you point the camera there is a picture.

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

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

I feel, having the choices I had, I felt I had more control over my own medium than I did over photography.

Only an individual can imagine, invent, or create. The whole audience of art is an audience of individuals.

Roy was just another bureaucrat to me, but I realized very soon that without Roy this thing would have died.

I've been asked a great deal about the influence I've had with my work and it's impossible to say, you know.

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

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

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

I became interested in photography when I was sharing a studio with Walker Evans, and found my own sketching was inadequate.

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.

Forms in art arise from the impact of idea upon material... so that thinking and belief and attitudes may endure as actual things.

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.

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

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.

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.

An amateur is someone who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.

In '38, this time I did a job for Mr. Stryker. I went on his payroll at about half the salary I was getting before, to cover what he called Harvest in Ohio.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I remember traveling around in Arkansas with Senator Robinson, and I told him what this little trick was. He felt very much part of it and had me take pictures of people unbeknownst to them.

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.

When a man returned from the field and we'd look at the work, we'd criticize each other very genuinely and never offensively. And we would avoid all tricks, angle shots were just horrible to us.

I did take my camera along, as I felt there wouldn't be enough time to draw the things I wanted to do. I did some drawing and did a lot of photography but I was not part of Stryker's outfit at all.

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.

So, I was offered this job to come down there but first it was suggested that I take a trip around the country in the areas in which we worked to see what it's all about, and I tell you that was a revelation to me.

Now, when I came on to Washington to begin my job, I was so interested in photography at that time that I really would have preferred to work with Stryker than with my department, which was more artistic if you wish.

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