Josef Albers Quotes

In teaching color, you teach people how to look something and see the tone in it and break it down to be able to paint it and reproduce that color. But then, I'm psychedelic, so I look at color differently. I like colors that are in contrast with one another, so that they flicker back and forth.

One can take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. So it would read as a black letter or a line, but it would also read as neon because there would be light coming from behind that black letter.

Since light is best expressed through differences in color quality, color should not be handled as a tonal gradation, to produce the effect of light.

Color deceives continuously.

It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.

I work with few colors, what creates the illusion of quantity is that they fell in the right place.

The art of the colorist has in some ways elements of mathematics and music.

Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow.

My goal is to formulate a new color theory based on the full spectrum of visible light.

Black and white creates a strange dreamscape that color never can.

I'm thinking about color all the time. Sometimes even as far back as the plotting sequence.

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.

Color is everything. When color is right, form is right.

Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.

Color must be thought, imagined, dreamed.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about. There is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that color has with forms, and the statement you're trying to make.

In general, therefore, color is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.

When we sit down to draw or paint the sun's rays, we generally use yellow because in the morning and the evening with the blue light scattered away so strongly you're left with a little bit of red and it comes out yellowish.

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon – it is the very heart of painting. Repeated experiments with adjacent colors will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.

Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep.

In the end, color combinations come down to our personal preferences, which we must discover through observation and experiment.

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

Above all, keep your colors fresh!