January 13, 2011 Still Life

Still Life #37 22"x22" gouache on w/c paper

The English painter Michael Craig-Martin, who studied under Josef Albers at Yale, wrote the catalogue for London's South Bank Centre's 1994 Albers touring exhibition:

"All Alber's teaching about colour was based on the premise of its inherent instability, and hence its unpredictability. His own work had led him to realize that theoretical, systematic and intellectually based attempts to organize and determine the use of colour were doomed to fail in practice. To be able to explain colour was not to understand how to use it. How could a colour chart or colour wheel be usefully accurate, when no two printings of the same book would produce precisely the same colours, let alone those of the artwork provided to the printer? Because colour could not be grasped intellectually (or held accurately in the memory), and because every colour situation was both unstable and unique, Albers located the understanding of colour in perception and, in practice, in the quality of perception. He considered our eyes to be lazy because they were rarely subjected to exercise."

"Yes, light, there is no other word for it." --Samuel Beckett