Representation, Abstraction & Symbolism Flashcards
Representation
Taking a fact-based documentary approach to a subject.
Trying to show something as it really is. (Maybe it’s education or serves as evidence of an event.)
Representational image carries with it the authority of being accurate and true.
Abstraction
To reveal something essential and evocative about the subject by simplifying its form.
For example, by adjusting and emphasizing the tone of an image we can create a feeling of suspense.
Symbolism
A simplification of the subject that creates a one-to-one between the symbol and a thing or an idea.
The connection between the symbol and the thing or idea is arbitrary. In that way, it’s like written language where a word has an arbitrary connection to the thing or idea it denotes.
Simplification
Turns representational images into abstract and symbolic images.
The Evolution of the Mouse
As we move from representation to abstraction to the symbolic we create, shift and refine meaning.
What gives us the facts and shows something as it is?
Representation.
Its goal is to be accurate if not objective.
Representation documents what we see and recognize from our environment and experience.
It is specific and reports the visual details.
Physical reality, the world we live in, provides the most basic and dominant visual experience–everything that we see and recognize is informed by context and past experience. This is what?
Representation
Linear Perspective
Objects appear larger in the foreground and smaller in the background.
Mathematically complex calculations create the scene and can be used to map out the architecture and figure placement.
Vertical Perspective
Before the invention of linear perspective, hierarchy was created by the size and placement of objects and figures to indicate which was most important.
Photo Realist Painting
Recreated the documentary style of camera to produce hyper-realistic representational art.
Photographs suggest a lack of bias and are often used as evidence of facts. This photo realist painting challenges and maybe even make fun of that bias.
What is the simplification of reality and generalizes the facts while intensifying the feeling of the visual content?
Abstraction.
We abstract images by taking liberties with color, form and light, etc. Subjects can be partially of fully abstracted.
We use abstraction to create a feeling or an ambiance.
It is evocative.
What is the process of abstraction?
Relies on reducing elements to simple, basic shapes.
Abstracting a representational tree form…
Provides adaptive flexibility in the design of a shade structure.
Allows selective use of the critical parts of the form in conceptual charts and approaches the symbolic.
Abstract Meaning IS
Created by simplifying.
Direct and emotional.
Intense, distilled and elemental.
Has a direct connection to our visual perception.
Has impact with fewer specific external references.
The more abstracted, the more general and universal (vs the more representational, the more specific).
Finds the structural level of any image, in terms of tone, shape, color, line, direction, meaning, etc.
The Abstract level of meaning is the understructure of composition in terms of elements like:
tone, shape, color.
line, direction.
balance vs instability.
stasis vs activeness.
meaning.
emotional impact.
