Art Representation Quotes

#1. A picture was a motionless record of motion. An arrested representation of life. A picture was the kiss of death pretending to possess immutability.

Ivan Klima

#2. Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.

Okakura Kakuzo

#3. Art in painting should consist only of the representation of things that are visible and tangible.

Gustave Courbet

#4. Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

Agnes Martin

#5. A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.

Wassily Kandinsky

#6. Landscape is the creation of the one God - his sensuous image and revelation, through the investigation of which, by science or its representation by art, men's hearts are lifted toward him.

James Jackson Jarves

#7. ... Lyotard suggests that while discourse operates as a system of representation which defines meanings according to their relation to other concepts in that system, figure is the realm of the singular, of that which refuses to, or simply cannot, be captured and systematized by the concept.

Nicholas Gane

#8. You can't draw her because you idolize her. You keep trying to create a tribute. But these drawings aren't about that. They're the truth.

Michael Walterich

#9. Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

Tim O'Brien

#10. The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.

Paul Klee

#11. Art can no longer be merely a mirror, it must act as the organizer of the people's consciousness ... No form of representation is so readily comprehensible to the masses as photography.

El Lissitzky

#12. The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image.

Gilles Deleuze

#13. The observer must learn to look at the picture as a graphic representation of a mood and not as a representation of objects.

Wassily Kandinsky

#14. In the final analysis, style is art. And art is nothing more or less than various modes of stylized, dehumanized representation.

Susan Sontag

#15. Without design, there may be representation, but there can be no art.

Kenyon Cox

#16. Whether art is defined as a representation of or response to reality, it demands an intense engagement with things we haven't managed to understand fully.

Joanna Scott

#17. Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things.

Gustave Courbet

#18. Hence it is from the representation of things spoken by means of posture and gesture that the whole of the art of dance has been elaborated.

Plato

#19. Art does not want the representation of a beautiful thing, but the representation of something beautiful.

Immanuel Kant

#20. Art requires that you make something else exist that is a representation of what your feeling is, or your idea.

Anna Deavere Smith

#21. I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation.

Robert Smithson

#22. Movies aren't just supposed to be a representation of reality. They're supposed to be an art.

James Mangold

#23. The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

#24. One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to faithfully copy from nature.

Henry Fox Talbot

#25. Great Representation of the Art and Use of Fencing, written by the Italian maestro Ridolfo Capo Ferro

Cary Elwes

#26. Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.

A.S. Byatt

#27. Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective.

Lewis Hyde

#28. Art is a meditation upon external reality rather than a representation of external reality

Donald Barthelme

#29. Emphasizing the body as art, these artists amplified the role of process over product and shifted from representation objects to presentational modes of action.

Kristine Stiles

#30. In many respects, theater is still grappling with problems of reality and representation that the visual art movement realized were unimportant many years ago.

Tim Crouch

#31. Picture, n. A representation in two dimensions of something wearisome in three.

Ambrose Bierce

#32. I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.

Jeff Koons