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goat talk one
rick well of inspiration
Josef Albers represents the single greatest influence on the rick brand. His groundbreaking publication, Interaction of Colour, serves as a sacred text, a northern star. i've embedded the full text in PDF form below, at the bottom of this page, and strongly recommend anyone flip through it.
There is a before and after Albers the likes of which we will never see again.
Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Josef Albers, three minds that fundamentally shifted the way our species perceives colour. Please enjoy this, the first in a series exploring my heroes and rick influences.
There is a before and after Albers the likes of which we will never see again.
Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Josef Albers, three minds that fundamentally shifted the way our species perceives colour. Please enjoy this, the first in a series exploring my heroes and rick influences.
design hero - one
Josef Albers
Josef Albers was born in 1888 in Bottrop, a small industrial town in western Germany, the son of a house painter. A seemingly obvious origin for a man who would spend his life thinking about how colour behaves on surfaces. He trained as a teacher, then as an artist, arriving at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920 as a student, and staying to become one of its most influential teachers. The Bauhaus, Walter Gropius's radical experiment unifying art, craft, and design, believed that mass manufacturing techniques could be applied to produce beautiful objects. An extremist ideology in a time that saw factory lines replace centuries-old traditions of craftsmanship. While his colleague Wassily Kandinsky taught colour as a spiritual force, Albers preferred a methodology rooted in physical experimentation. He put colour swatches in students' hands and asked them to simply look at what happened when one colour sat beside another.
At Yale university, he chaired the Department of Design from 1950 to 1958, Albers refined his philosophy of "searching" over "re-searching", direct experimentation over inherited knowledge. He rarely lectured. Instead, he handed students coloured paper, cheap, flat, uniformly pigmented, and issued deceptively simple challenges. Take three pieces of paper, all different colours, and make them appear as four distinct hues. Or do the opposite: make four colours read as three. Each exercise isolated some specific aspect of colour interaction so that it could be observed carefully, essentially a challenge: can you get these colours to do this? Can you find the colours that will do that?
His 1963 treatise Interaction of Colour, remains the definitive text on colour perception. Its argument was simple and revolutionary: colour has no fixed identity. It is always relative, always in conversation with what surrounds it. Albers dedicated the book to those students, noting that they had taught him more about colour than any book ever had. That idea now lives inside every design curriculum, every brand guideline, every product on every shelf.
In 1972 The Metropolitan Museum held a retrospective on Albers career. The exhibition was a landmark event as Albers was the first living artist to be granted a solo retrospective by the museum.
It's impossible to ever locate where his influence ends and begins, because it is simply so omnipotent. A true hero of mine and someone whose work, teachings, and ideology I return to on a daily basis.
The National Gallery of Victoria has an Albers work permanently displayed on level three of its international gallery, (see below). From his timeless and endlessly evocative decades-spanning series Homage to the Square. Representing his most easily recognisable work, the series began in 1950 and continued until his death in 1976, over a thousand paintings, all built on the same simple structure: three or four squares, nested inside one another. The format never changes. The colour always does. That was the point. By fixing every other variable, Albers isolated colour as the sole subject, proving that two identical squares could look entirely different depending on what surrounded them.
The National Gallery of Victoria has an Albers work permanently displayed on level three of its international gallery, (see below). From his timeless and endlessly evocative decades-spanning series Homage to the Square. Representing his most easily recognisable work, the series began in 1950 and continued until his death in 1976, over a thousand paintings, all built on the same simple structure: three or four squares, nested inside one another. The format never changes. The colour always does. That was the point. By fixing every other variable, Albers isolated colour as the sole subject, proving that two identical squares could look entirely different depending on what surrounded them.
(Josef Albers, Homage to the square: Autumn echo, 1966, National Gallery of Victoria)
I would be lying if I said I never walked into that building with the sole purpose of standing in front of that work and that work alone.
A well that will simply never run dry.
A well that will simply never run dry.