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of three distinct semiotic domains: (1) A black border extends across the bottom of each canvas occasionally rising up one vertical side to define the canvas occasionally rising up one vertical side to define the canvas surface as a "page" upon which some graphic text is usually applied in the panner of a caption. (2) Above this black border and extending up the sides of the canvas a blue ground defines a shallow "pictorial" space usually people with traditional representation images from "real life." (3) Above and "behind" this pictorial space, a large, concave rectangular area in the shape of a "Vista-vision" screen files the entire upper and central two-thirds of the canvas within the black and blue borders providing a domain for "pure images" -- that is, for images whose reference is not to the phenomenal world but to the generalized world of metaphor, definition, and abstraction. 
In the language of semiotics, then, these canvases are divided into a flat black field of graphic signs, a shallow blue field of phenomenol signs, and a symbolic (no-size) field of categorical signs, providing a syntax for "sorting out" out these [[scratched out/]] three [[/ scratched out]] leveled of reference and visualizing the otherwise invisible anomalies and interpenetrations generated by what Charles Norris calls "the tripartite compositions of signs." [[scratched out/]] According to [[/scratched out]] In forms' Formulation every sign or groups of signs embodies, regardless of its apparent neutrality, a designative component (denoting this or that), an appraaisive component (assessing good or bad), and a prescriptive component (implying ought or ought not). The paintings are equally and urgently concerned with the business of laying bare these subliminal appraise and prescriptive cultural undertones of apparently neutral designative terms and images, and