In some previous features we looked at the inspirations you can get from minerals. In a recent post on the site of Danish Kvadrat, manufacturer of interior design fabrics, Jonathan Olivares wrote about the power of rock and minerals. The industrial designer looked at them from the point of view of colour: Olivares visited indeed the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums to study the minerals that were used as pigments before the advent of synthetic colours.
Looking at the colours and textures of the azurite, chromite, cinnebar, clay haematite, copper, galena, gold, graphite, green earth, gypsum rosette, Indian lake, malachite, Pozzuoli earth, realgar, willemite, talc, realgar, Armenian bole and celadonite on display, the designer realised he was staring at raw and unprocessed colours and he was going back through such pieces to a time when humans didn't intervene on colours, artificially enhancing or altering specific shades.
Interestingly enough, the colour palettes formed by the images of minerals collected by Olivares are incidentally similar to the ones employed by Dutch artist and designer Christien Meindertsma for her "Pigeon Service" installation at the "My Canvas" event organised by Kvadrat in September during the London Design Festival.
Meindertsma first created an installation using linen pigeons for Texture, the museum of flax in Kortrijk, Belgium. The work was initially inspired by the homing pigeons used for espionage during the First World War - some of them were indeed captured and locked into the building of the Linen Thread Company (now the Texture Museum) during the First World War.
In the installation for "My Canvas" the birds - each of them carrying a small rolled-up note on the side of its tail (so they could actually be used as messengers) - were employed to recreate a sort of three-dimensional colour card.
Yet in this case Meindertsma didn't look at minerals for inspiration, but reinterpreted via her trademark pigeons the colour nuances of a Kvadrat staple - the vibrant and elegant upholstery textile Canvas, crafted by renowned Italian colourist Giulio Ridolfo, first produced in 2012 and recently relaunched in a new set of shades inspired by the painterly landscapes of Skagen, Denmark.
So, though the inspiration in this case may not come from minerals, it is still borrowed from nature and in particular from the dark, light, cool and warm tones of the Nordic pastel panoramas and dramatic, dark coastlines.
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