While doing this week’s reading, I came across mention of the artist Joseph Albers and how he developed his theory on the perception of color and artistically portrayed it. I found his artwork to be both fascinating and hard to look at at the same time! So long story short, I decided to research him a bit more and here is what I found!
Albers was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, particularly his work on color perception, formed the basis of some of the most influential art education programs of the twentieth century. He was a sculpter, painter, and architect, and studying two dimensional arts before helping to develop the growing field of graphic design. Albers developed theories on how ideas and emotions could be conveyed through simple geometric shapes and ordinary colors, paving the way for a new type of artistic abstraction. Sometimes known as “the square man,” he made more than 1,000 paintings in his series, Homage to the Square, from 1950 until his death. The quasi-scientific series of paintings focused on optical effects of color within the confines of a uniform square shape. Albers developed a theory on the Interaction of Color which demonstrated such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusion of transparency and reversed grounds; all of which helped to explain the relationship between different colors placed close to one another.
An example of a study included in the Interaction of Color can be found above where the X on the left appears to be a golden sort of yellow and the X on the right appears to be a grayish violet. However, the X’s are the exact same color as seen by the fact that they are connected and are influenced by the contrast of their background color. This process occurs due to the fact that the eye is attempting to focus on both the purple and the yellow backgrounds and processes them by flicking back and forth between the two. The rapid movement creates after images which distort the brains’ perception of color.
