“Dots are just one example of an element in Lascaux art, and in all cave art… This is a profusion of nonrepresentational, geometric patterns. In addition to dots, there are grids and chevrons, curves and zigzags, and more. …The coincidence of these geometric motifs with representational images is one of the most puzzling aspects of Upper Paleolithic art. …images, six different kinds in all, are shimmering, incandescent, mercurial—and powerful. Called entoptic images—which means "within vision"—these phenomena are products of the basic neural architecture of the human brain.”

— Richard Leakey

Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)

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Richard Leakey 39

Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician 1944

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“The first major discovery of prehistoric art was the Spanish cave of Altamira, which, like Lascaux, is one of the most spectacular examples of Upper Paleolithic art yet known.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)

“Of the range of images in Upper Paleolithic art, the most arresting are the therianthropes. There are not many… but they seize the imagination. The most famous is the so-called sorcerer… In a manner unusual for Upper Paleolithic images, the sorcerer is staring directly out of the wall, a full-face stare that transfixes the spectator.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)

“Rhetoric is a dangerous art. It is the manipulation of the difference, one might say the distance, between truth and image […] And in our times, that distance has become the means by which power is exercised”

Nick Drake (poet) (1961) British writer

ibid
The Rahotep series, Book 2: Tutankhamun
Context: Rhetoric is a dangerous art. It is the manipulation of the difference, one might say the distance, between truth and image [... ] And in our times, that distance has become the means by which power is exercised [... ] Rhetoric has been a force for persuasion since man began to speak, and to convince his enemy that he was indeed his friend.

“Looking at, ie analyzing the so-called the visual elements of an image, we see the surface, the outer look of an artwork. All practical art education (the use of artistic elements, ie art grammar) is mainly focused on this surface analysis. Sometimes, through these elements, it tries to penetrate deep into the essence of the image, into what it initiated and created a work, into an experience (this is the primary task of theory, sociology, and art history). This is very difficult. There are works that undoubtedly suggest its depth and meaning, but there is, at least sometimes, the possibility of a mistake.”

Alfred Freddy Krupa (1971) Croatian contemporary painter, master draughtsman, book artist and art teacher, the pioneer of the New Ink Art m…

Aquarelle - Experiences of a Practitioner, Alfred Freddy Krupa , MB-Tisak (Croatia), 1994
1990s

“The subject matter of creation is chaos. The present feeling seems to be that the artist is concerned with form, color, and spatial arrangement. This objective approach to art reduces it to a kind of ornament. The whole attitude of abstract painting, for example, has been such that it has reduced painting to an ornamental art whereby the picture surface is broken up in geometrical fashion into a new kind of design-image. It is a decorative art built on a slogan of purism where the attempt is made for an unworldly statement…”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 139

“We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

“I realized that the image I had been given by my teachers, the scientists.... by their way of looking at Nature, was just another stage setting with all the magnificence and ingenuity that the genius of any artist produces in a work of art. I realized that in my scientific journey I had been under the power of a magic spell of a work of art whose reality was just as true as the verity of the image in an artist's vision.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Quote from Of divers arts, (1962), p. 21; as cited in International Handbook on Giftedness, Larisa V. Shavinina (2009), p. 862
undated

“The world as a sense, independent of the image, of the idea - this is the essence of the content of art. [My] square is not an image, just as a switch or socket are not the current.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

Malevich
Quote of Malevich, in his letter to Konstantin Rozhdestvenskii, 21 April, 1927, private archive, Moscow (transl. Todd Bludeau); as quoted by Vasilii Rakitin, in The great Utopia - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 27
1921 - 1930

“The main virtue of geometric shapes is that they aren't organic, as all art otherwise is. A form that's neither geometric or organic would be a great discovery.”

Donald Judd (1928–1994) artist

Donald Judd (1967), quoted in: Alexander Alberro, ‎Blake Stimson (1999) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. p. 204
1960s

“Where I am always thou art. Thy image lives within my heart.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Bad Moon Rising

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