Non Representational Quotes

#1. The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural ... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.

Ben Nicholson

#2. Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

Will Self

#3. The invention of photography destroyed the canons of representational, imitative art.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

#4. If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic image formed by a lens, I see no reason why we should stand on our heads to distort that function. On the contrary, we should take hold of that very quality, make use of it, and explore it to the fullest.

Berenice Abbott

#5. As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.

Ayn Rand

#6. The individual artist is a medium for making representational and deeply meaningful symbols of the community's collective consciousness, whether they are symbols of the community's religion, love, hurt, power, hate, hope, dream, fables, foibles or on and on and on.

Inga Muscio

#7. Vinyl is democratic, as surely as the iPod is fascist. Vinyl is representational: It has a face. Two faces, in fact, to represent the dualism of human nature. Vinyl occupies physical space honestly, proud as a fat woman dancing.

Adam Mansbach

#8. Representational painters: place your works in a larger context. Give your work not only breadth but breath. Do not 'copy' what you see outwardly but give it 'spirit.

Joshua L. Goldberg

#9. Nothing disappears completely ... In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows ... Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.

Henri Lefebvre

#10. We could retell our stories and make them better, more representational or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#11. By its nature, government was either small and personal, something on the level of a town hall meeting, or it was tyranny, with the few ruling the many for their own benefit, no matter how representational that government might be in theory.

William H. Keith Jr.

#12. I want to make portraits and images. I don't know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.

Francis Bacon

#13. I firmly believe that a representational painting is only as strong as its abstract components.

Robert Reynolds

#14. Ambiguity is really important to me. Part of the difficulty facing photographers is that almost any subject matter has accumulated a representational history, so to find a new discursive space, a space to wander around those subject matters, is a real challenge.

Larry Sultan

#15. The representational-image urge is actually a kind of heightened perception, and I don't stop to think. I don't freeze up - it's actually a kind of letting-go. It's like dancing. At a certain point it's conscious, unconscious, everything is kind of coming together.

Michael Light

#16. Apart from the representational content of an idea there is another component: its force and vivacity, its impetus.

David Hume

#17. Representational painters: loosen the grip of inflexibility! Abstract painters: tighten your hold on crafting your images! In both types of painting students need to unlearn what one has acquired.

Joshua L. Goldberg

#18. What do you see when you look at a representational painting? Most of the time, the first thing I see is a flat piece of canvas covered with colored patterns.

Terry Teachout

#19. My art is representational by choice ... if the art of painting is to survive, it must describe and express people, their lives and times. It must communicate.

Rainer Maria Rilke

#20. It became clear to me that I had to push it toward a more representational way of drawing.

Joe Sacco

#21. Raising a child is a little like Picasso's work; in the beginning he did very conventional representational things. Cubism came after he had the rules down pat.

Anna Quindlen

#22. Abstract and conceptual painters face different demons than representational painters, but neither group has a monopoly on either authenticity or originality.

Steven Whitney

#23. I do not believe that there was ever a question of being abstract or representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing, and stretching one's arms again transcendental experiences became possible.

Mark Rothko

#24. Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there.

Simon Blackburn

#25. I've never been a representational artist at all. Most artists have been representational. That's when you discover yourself.

Carl Andre

#26. I was struggling to figure out how to combine the abstract and the representational. Painting, I suddenly understood how that aesthetic could fit together. That was a really fun game to figure out how that worked.

Margaux Williamson

#27. I'm not a princess. My mother is, not I. I am the niece of a head of state. And with this status, I have some representational duties - nothing very constraining or very exceptional.

Charlotte Casiraghi

#28. Music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans.

Daniel J. Levitin

#29. I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

Jackson Pollock

#30. Photography, when used as a representational art, is not a mere copy of nature. This is proved by the rarity of the 'good' photograph.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

#31. History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy.

Robert Smithson

#32. I think what's fun about the Western genre is the character arcs are very strong and, arguably, more interesting and exciting than the action that is metaphorically representational of those arcs.

Jon Favreau

#33. Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor.

Jake Gyllenhaal

#34. One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

Ludwig Wittgenstein