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| Josef Albers |
Joesf Albers was a German born American artist who
is most known for his works with the exploration of colour. His most well-known
work ‘homage to the square’ makes this evident, consisting of 3-4 squares of colour
that showed a level of gradient but never mixed. The idea of the work was to
show to the audience the oxymoronic nature of colour and the way in which you
can work with it. He experimented with the idea that colour is both dependant
and independent at the same time, the idea that it can be representative of
both opposing ideas. His need to show dependence of colour with each other is
shown in his pieces through the use of the selected colours. Reds, yellows and
oranges were placed together, giving the idea of ‘warm’ tones, similarly blues,
and greens placed together giving the idea of ‘cool’ tones. The way the
audience perceives these colours to be linked to temperature is through colour
theory, each of the colours create this depiction of another thing – in this
case temperature. Although none of the colours themselves are bleeding into
each other, showing the need for co-dependency of the colours to represent the
artist’s thoughts. Yet at the same time he manages to represent their own independence
through the very fact of having them in a square structure in which none of
them bleed, meaning any element could be taken away and the piece still make
sense. This is something unique to the piece as it can be minimised to its
core and still communicate part of its meaning, though if the colours were
removed it would lack the representation of ‘warm’ or ‘cool’ tones.
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| Homage to the square |
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| Homage to the square |
To be able to further develop an understanding of
the method and the way in which Albers uses colour within his work I have
created my own attempt using the colour swatches I created from the photograph I
took of Leeds. The tones I have used when on the page seemed too similar to
each other to be used within the same piece but when taken and put into a
different larger context, the tones create a gradient out of their separate solid
blocks. Similar to that of Albers works.
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| My Experimentation |
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