Colour, Based on Nature by Irma Boom

Colour – Based on Nature

"Abstraction is the act of stripping away everything superfluous from nature, leaving only its underlying structure."

This artist's book expresses some of the Earth's most extraordinary landscapes—including the Great Barrier Reef—through colour alone. Its author is the Dutch graphic designer Irma Boom. As a means of representing nature, every element except colour has been deliberately subtracted.

This was not her first exploration of abstraction through colour. Even before this publication, she had experimented with extracting colour alone from paintings and national flags. In 2004, when she published Colour, Based on Art, a companion volume to this book, one reader complained that "it looks like wallpaper—I want to return the book." Rather than dismissing the criticism, she found it amusing. Taking the comment as an unexpected source of inspiration, she approached Knoll Textiles and went on to produce actual wallpaper based on the project.

On websites where the wallpaper is still available today, the abstracted colour codes are shown alongside the original landscape photographs. Seeing them together, one naturally thinks, "So this landscape became these particular colours." But in this book, the original photographs never appear. They have been intentionally excluded. She remains faithful to what Kobayashi described as "the work of abstraction."

Every page is printed with specially mixed colours, richly saturated in solid fields of ink. From monochrome pages to striped compositions, each sheet is perforated at two-centimeter intervals, inviting the reader to tear out narrow strips of colour. Once removed, however, the cut edges become softly frayed, revealing an unexpectedly organic texture. I encourage you to summon the courage to tear out a few pages. Like picking a single flower from a vast meadow, the book offers the quiet pleasure of selecting a colour that speaks to you.

The colours reproduced throughout the book are derived from photographs of 80 UNESCO World Heritage natural sites across six continents. Information about each site is discreetly printed near the gutter of the corresponding page. In this sense, the book is also an homage to these extraordinary places—and to the people dedicated to protecting them.

From the Preface

The book colour-based on nature provides an intriguing analysis and graphic exploration of colour through an examination of 80 UNESCO nature sites, ranging from Great Barrier Reef in Australia to the Jungfrau in Switzerland. Each double folded page takes on a specially printed individual colour and is perforated into strips, playing on the idea of a colour sample book. Opening the double page with a blunt knife or letter-opener reveals an abstract colour diagram of a nature site and provides for a reflection on the beauty of colours in nature.

Background

Matthieu Lommen, a typography specialist and longtime friend of Irma Boom, recounts the story behind this publication in Book Activist:

The now defunct annual Grafisch Nederland, which for many decades served as a calling card for the Dutch graphic industries, provided a design commission grounded in the notion of free reign. Each issue was devoted to a particular theme. IB had long wanted to make a book about colour, and in 2004 this commission gave her the opportunity. She chose as a subject the relation between fine art and graphic technique.

In offset printing, artwork is scanned and separated into the printer’s four colours for reproduction: cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black) (CMYK). In Kleur / Colour IB therefore modified eighty works of art from four centuries into diagrams and full-page colour swatches. It was printed in CMYK for the diagrams, and in eighty specially mixed PMS colours for the solid areas. These diagrams or bar codes lead to compositions with fascinating colour schemes.

All leaves have several lines of perforations and the reader, by opening the fore-edge fold along one of the perforated lines, creates the remarkable untrimmed edge. "It is a book to be deconstructed," she says. Many recipients of Grafisch Nederland had no idea what to do with it, and some of them returned their copies. One fault-finder said it looked like wallpaper. IB immediately turned this to good use and began developing premier wallpapers. The American KnollTextiles collaborated with her in issuing a Stripes Collection for interior design. The "Art Barcodes" were also featured on a DVD, with a musical score written especially for her by the English composer Michael Nyman.

Almost immediately a companion piece to Colour was planned, which appeared in 2012 under the title Colour – Based on Nature.