Last Man Standing
Montreal, December 2003

I've always liked to use red, white, and black together. I found this interesting comment on the black/white/red colour combination in Art and Physics by Leonard Shlain. Shlain is discussing the the fact that certain primitive cultures do not have words for colours such as blue, while advanced cultures do:

"In the eighty-eight languages and dialects they examined, they found that a totally color-blind language did not exist. The least sophisticated, the vernaculars spoken by the bushmen of Africa and the aborigines of Australia, had separate words for only black, white, and red. These were the bedrock minimum that could always be found in the speech of every ordinary or exotic inhabitant of the planet. Many diverse religions have traded upon the primitive evocative power of this combination. The Catholic Church intuitively understood the fundamental sovereignty of the three. Hitler, who plumbed the emotions of the German people, perversely manipulated these same three when in a stroke of brilliance, he personally chose black, white, and red for emblematic swastikas of the Third Reich."

Shlain goes on to say that "only in the most mature languages, belonging to the most sophisticated civilizations, does a separate word for the colour blue make an appearance, and usually it does so very late in the culture's development."