Josef Albers

  

    Josef Albers: 

     "Homage to the Square, 1965
Accomplished as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker, and poet, Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He favored a very disciplined approach to composition. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series, Homage to the Square. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with nested squares. Usually painting on Masonite, he used a palette knife with oil colors and often recorded the colors he used on the back of his works. Each painting consists of either three or four squares of solid planes of color nested within one another, in one of four different arrangements and in square formats ranging from 406×406 mm to 1.22×1.22 m.
in 1950, at the age of 62, Albers began what would become his signature series, the Homage to the Square. Over the next 26 years, until his death in 1976, he produced hundreds of variations on the basic compositional scheme of three or four squares set inside each other, with the squares slightly gravitating towards the bottom edge. What may at first appear to be a very narrow conceptual framework reveals itself as one of extraordinary perceptual complexity. In 1965, he wrote of the series: ‘They all are of different palettes, and, therefore, so to speak, of different climates. Choice of the colours used, as well as their order, is aimed at an interaction - influencing and changing each other forth and back. Thus, character and feeling alter from painting to painting without any additional ‘hand writing’ or, so-called, texture. Though the underlying symmetrical and quasi-concentric order of squares remains the same in all paintings – in proportion and placement – these same squares group or single themselves, connect and separate in many different ways.


INSPIRED BY JOSEF ALBERS:

This is an inspired image that i had created of Josef's Albers 'Homage of the squares' , to create these two images i had used Adobe Photoshop and used the custom shape tool to create equal sided sqaures containing 3 squares in each, using Albers as a inspiration i took some simulatries as in using colour and having different scaled squares within a bigger square but i also added my own taste into my inspired piece , i used three squares in a pair of squares instead of four in the first image and in the second image i used 5 and i also used the same colours but a range from light to dark, i did not mix the colours up like Albers only because its what i thought  looked better. Personally, some people think that the coloured squares are seen to be just plain and simple but i believe that plain and simple has a lot more meaning then something being complex, for example due to the colour scheme i have choosen its stereotypically seen to be childish and targeted to children but the use of the colours in my work portrays  the beauty of happiness and purity.