Poured Acrylic in Art Nouveau colors. the combination of the colors and the curls swirled a la Aubrey Beardsley.

My sister is 10 years younger than I. When she was in kindergarten and I was in High School, she came home crying that her teacher (like many teachers) had criticized her art work. The teacher didn’t know what the picture was about. My sister had enough motor control to actually draw something but it wasn’t “a thing” it was defined shapes colored in.

I had a similar experience when I was a kid. My teacher objected to a green sky even though I maintained that it was sunset. Also, I guessed that my sister was copying some abstract that I had been working on so I was obliged to make it better.

So I told her that she should tell the teacher that is was “A Design”. She did that the next time she had a turn at the easel.

I had forgotten the entire thing till my sister told me, fairly recently, how much it meant to her. Now, whenever the idea of design comes up I think of the story.

So, for me, non-representational art is A Design.