Pattern, surface and colour

Brief

This lesson asks you to explain how the elements and principles of design are used in art works to communicate meaning or understanding. The museum offers two examples from Islamic decoration: the flat vegetal arabesque, and Moroccan zellij tilework, where colour and cutting carry the design. Package designs and modern paintings your class must bring from elsewhere. ¹

What does the surface do to a design?

Compare a pattern that respects its surface with one that seems to grow out of it. Ask how the impression changes.

Where does colour carry the idea and where does shape?

In the tile example look at what rests on differences of colour and what rests on cutting the ceramic. What would happen if one of them were missing?

Go deeper

Zellij is the ceramic mosaic used to cover floors and walls in Morocco. ² Newcomb describes two ways of making a pattern from tile in Morocco. Some of the mosaic is made of small squares, hexagons and other regular shapes, and its pattern is carried by colour. Some is true mosaic, with the pieces cut and laid like marble or glass tesserae. ³

Think about it

In the first kind the pattern is carried by colour. If every piece were the same colour, what would happen to that pattern, and why?

Into the museum

Zellij: Moroccan ceramic mosaic, its kinds and how it was made.
The Decorative Tiles of North Africa: the monograph this description comes from.
Arabesque: plant ornament whose leaves stay joined to their stalks.

Try this

Read about the arabesque and zellij. On a square sheet, draw a flat pattern of stylised leaves, then colour a regular grid in two colours, and write how each choice changes the meaning.