Josef Albers (1888 – 1976) was an American artist and educator originally from Germany. Josef Albers inspires me because although his artwork looks simple there is really a lot of thought put behind it and theories about colour and shapes. I love bright vibrant colours and wanted to experiment more with this, in a similar style to Josef Albers. He is particularly known for his study of colour, and artwork including his style of geometric abstraction.From 1916 to 1919 he began his work as a printmaker at the Kunstgewerbschule in Essen. After previously trying screenprinting this took my interest and I wanted to experiment with different colours and shapes through a screenprinting technique.
I discovered Josef Albers artwork in the books ‘Interaction of Color’ by Josef Albers, and ‘Colour in Art’ by John Gage when focusing on my Bauhaus art project. I’m also deeply interested in the artworks by Wassily Kandinsky, Mark Rothko, Sonia Delaunay and Piet Mondrian, and how each artist has their own style and technique of using colour in a way of expressing some form of message whether it be religious, psychological or emotional.
The most famous artwork by Josef Albers is Homage to the Square in which hundreds of paintings and prints make up the series. In this huge series, starting from 1949, Albers began to explore chromatic interactions with nested squares. Each painting had either three or four squares of solid planes of colour nested within one another, in one of four different arrangements. Influenced by this concept, I experimented with different geometric shapes myself in varying colours, and tried layering my colours during my screenprinting and watercolour artwork to achieve different interactions with my colour choices.
In visual perception a colour is almost never seen as it really is – as it physically is. This fact makes colour the most relative medium in art. In order to use colour effectively it is necessary to recognize that colour deceives continually, constantly changing to our sight when placed with a different colour. One and the same colour can give innumerable readings, appearing different in alternating colour situations.
Albers defined the standard academic approach of “theory and practice”, focusing instead on “development of observation and articulation”, with an emphasis not only on seeing colour, but also feeling the relationships between colours. Basically Albers wanted to show the interactions of colour through experimentation.
Colour can be understood through experiencing it yourself, like when I tried screenprinting with different coloured paints and background card colours, each piece gave a different vibe than the previous print did. By comparing and contrasting different colours we can begin to understand how colours interact with each other and how to use this colour interaction. So I tried to experiment with this theory, using different templates and colours in my own screenprinting; using squares and triangles, different coloured paint and card. I tried many compositions and even layering my template prints to observe a different interaction of colour.
Suzanne's Art 