Creativity Quote by Leonard Baskin

There’s a kind of blunt decency in Baskin’s phrasing that feels deliberately anti-mythic: “if you touch ordinary people” isn’t sentimental uplift, it’s a test of proximity. Touch here means contact without aesthetic distance - not the glamorous “everyday hero” varnish, but the physical fact of bodies that age, labor, and endure. As an artist famous for unsparing, weighty human figures, Baskin is pushing against the cultural reflex to turn “the people” into symbols. Get close enough, he insists, and the symbol collapses back into a person.

The repetition - “ordinary people... simply ordinary people” - reads like a refusal to let ideology (left or right) recruit them. No romanticization, no contempt. “The way they’ve always been” carries a faint, weary historicism: generations repeating the same bargain with necessity. Then he pivots to economics without adopting the posture of a political speech. “They work hard” is plain, almost axiomatic, but it sets up the quiet indictment that follows: “they don’t have really as much as they should.” The hedge words (“really,” “as they should”) matter; they make the critique moral rather than programmatic. He’s not proposing policy, he’s naming a mismatch between effort and reward that feels stable, normalized, and therefore easy to ignore.

The intent is less to speak for ordinary people than to correct the viewer’s gaze. Baskin’s subtext: representation is an ethical act, and distance is where cruelty - and cheap inspiration - thrive.