Commune | Daily

We came across the book, Color Form and Theory by Wana Derge, in search of inspiration for unique floral arrangements and were surprised to find a selection of painted color swatches depicting color theory and combinations. The book illustrates how to achieve maximum color vitality versus “dull” or “crude” pairings, but each color composition seem to us to have a beauty of it’s own.

The gracious art form of floral design is handled with the ideal that each flower, bud, stem, leaf, rock and accessory will fit perfectly together to create a blend of intriguing color and form.

Color Form and Composition by Wana Derge

A follow up to our Gutai post, Mono-ha was the subsequent Japanese movement in the late 1960s that continued, expanded and distilled the ideals of its predecessor.

Their aim was simply to bring ‘things’ together, as far as possible in an unaltered state, allowing the juxtaposed materials to speak for themselves. Hence, the artists no longer ‘created’ but ‘rearranged’ ‘things’ into artworks, drawing attention to the interdependent relationships between these ‘things’ and the space surrounding them. The aim was to challenge pre-existing perceptions of such materials and relate to them on a new level.

During the 1980’s a group of activists began “ACT UP: a diverse and non partisan group united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis”. They essentially took the idea of a corporate Identity and turned it on its head: Using a uniform typeface, a typographic style, set of colors and a way of handing imagery to create a graphic identity for their activist movement. Like their corporate counterparts, every piece of propaganda was unified under a single visual language, giving a relatively small movement unity, impact, and recognition to their cause as well as the tools for their  followers to spread a cohesive message (that was always set in futura).