Josef Albers Quotes

Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.

Repeated similar experiments with adjacent colors will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from colors which it carries and therefore influences.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?

In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.

There are colors which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a couple which complete each other like man and woman.

The color of the object illuminated partakes of the color of that which illuminates it.

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.

But what I attach great importance to is observation of the movement of colors. It is only in this way that I have found the laws of complementary contrast and the simultaneity of those colors that nourish the rhythm of my vision. There I find the representative essence — which does not arise from a system or an a priori theory.

All painting worth its name, unless one is talking about black and white, must include the idea of color as one of its necessary supports, in the same way that it includes chiaroscuro, proportion, and perspective.

Color cannot stand alone.

Color is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that's the difference!

Suffice it to say that black and white are also colors... for their simultaneous contrast is as striking as that of green and red, for instance.

Many photographers are apt to confuse color with noise, and to congratulate themselves when they have almost blown you down with screeching hues alone-a bebop of electric blues, furious reds, and poison greens.

If I hold up a red square for 30 seconds and take it away, you will see a perfect green square. It's how the eye works. So if you want to paint a really good red painting, you have to strategically place in some green, so the eye is brought back.

Color is a big part of what I do. It's like music. There are only so many notes in the scale, but there are endless permutations; there's no limit to the number. Color on the walls or furniture can reflect back and distort the reality of the true colors of lipsticks and eye shadow.

Black is not a color.

There are people who don't respond to color. That's what painting is. It's color.

It's really easy to get colors right. It's really hard to get black - and neutrals - right. Black is certainly a color but it's also an illusion.

It is not the form that dictates the color, but the color that brings out the form.

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

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

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.

Though colour may appear at first a part of painting merely mechanical, yet it still has its rules, and those grounded upon that presiding principle which regulates both the great and the little in the study of a painter.

There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.