universally occurring shapes lacking universal meaning

 FORMS   

Berkeley art majors were required to take, among other classes, Line and Form, and Form and Color. An objective of these courses was to enable students to  understand that a form has a distinctively visual function, most easily apprehended in compositional terms with respect to its relationships or interactions with other forms, lines, and with color. Forms do not necessarily convey meaning or posses content.

A form can manifest, or represent, shape, or space. It can have color, either enclosed in it, or as in the open color of Raoul Dufy. A form encompassed by a line might be one form, and an area of open color partially occupying the delineated form might constitute a separate form, overlapping the outlined one, resulting in a complex intersection between two forms -- one defined by an outline, the other defined by an area of color.