Crimson & Olive & Black

Crimson (vivid, deeply passionate warm) with Olive (dark, muted, earthy warm) on Black (absolute darkness) creates the most dramatically high-contrast and most visually powerful of all the Crimson + Olive combinations. Black absorbs all light and creates the most extreme possible backdrop for the passionate crimson and the muted olive — the combination of these three creates the most dramatically forceful and most visually impactful palette.

The palette is the visual world of Japanese Edo-period sumi-e painting and lacquerware (Edo period — 江戸時代 — 1603-1868 — the period of the Tokugawa shogunate — the most significant period of Japanese art, craft, and aesthetic development, producing the most celebrated traditions of woodblock printing, lacquer, ceramics, and painting in the history of Japanese material culture). The Edo sumi-e palette: the deep vivid crimson of the hanko (判子 — personal seal — the vermilion-inked stamp seal used by Japanese artists and writers to authenticate their work — the characteristic vivid vermilion-red of the seal ink — sumi — which is the most dramatically vivid and most immediately identifiable element of any Japanese ink painting); the dark muted olive of the Wabi-cha tea bowl glazes and Japanese natural gold lacquer (the most celebrated wabi aesthetic object — the Raku tea bowl — typically has a clay body glazed in a specific dark muted olive-to-brown — the 'tea color' or cha-iro — reflecting the dark muted tones of the most deeply considered wabi-cha aesthetic objects); and the absolute black of the Japanese sumi ink (sumi — 墨 — the carbon-black ink stick — the primary medium of Japanese and Chinese ink painting — and of the Japanese lacquerware ground — urushi-nuri — the polished black lacquer surface on which the most elaborate Maki-e gold decoration is applied).