For the viewer, they might experience the transition to the brighter red differently. Different shades of red are used, with transparency effects, to create a brighter shade of red as perception is focused to the center of the painting. Using opaque pieces of colored paper, Albers sets out to show the highly dynamic nature of color, particularly how humans tend to perceive a color based on the colors around it. This hands on tutorial demonstrates how one color can appear as two, based on Josef Alberss Interaction of Color. In Homage to the Square: Wet and Dry, different shades of red are explored. Josef Albers, a student of Itten’s at the Bauhaus, took a more demonstrative approach in his Interaction of Color from 1963. Some of Albers work is viewable on Bukowskis. His teachings on the perception and experience of color were the basis of a potential color wheel left to the intention of the creator. One of the interesting aspects of this painting is that all of these colors are closely related in how they translate into one another through the experience of the painting.įrom an artistic point of view, Josef Albers left an open book for the artist. This painting shows four different squares: green, blue, gray, and yellow. One of the paintings from this series, Homage to the Square: Apparition, is viewable online and physically at the Gugenheim. In this series of paintings, he explores the contrast of both colors and perceptions. One of Albers most striking works is Homage to the Square. In his teachings at Black Mountain College, which were later perfected at Yale, he showed that if you put a certain color next to another, and another color after that, you could expect certain results. Paintings from the series like Variant/Adobe: Familiar Front (1948) and Red Wall (1947-1956) explored how different colors interact when placed next to one another.

However, after enough experimentation, an artist (or quilter for that matter), can learn to predict the behavior of color through experience. The series combined two characteristics of Albers’s art: his exploration of color theory and his background in design and architecture. He characterized color as being passive, deceiving, and unstable. As a color theorist, Josef Albers made some assertions that color was best studied through experience.

Josef albers colour theory