Josef albers quotes

When we are honest - that's my saying - if we are honest then we will reveal ourselves. But we do not have to make an effort to be individualistic, different from others.

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.

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

A painter paints because he has no time not to paint.

One line plus one line results in many meanings.

The role of art for me is the visualization of attitude, of the human attitude towards life, towards the world.

In my basic courses I have always tried to develop discovery and invention which, in my opinion, are the criteria of creativeness.

I have taught my students not to apply rules or mechanical ways of seeing.

I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training.

It is not so for art in appreciation because art is concerned with human behavior. And science is concerned with the behavior of metal or energy. It depends on what the fashion is. Now today it's energy. It's the same soul behind it. The same soul, you see.

There is no difference between science and art when it comes to creativeness, productiveness, to come to conclusions and to formulations.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

Whether something 'has color' or not is as hard to define verbally as are such questions as, 'What is music?' or 'What is musical?

The aim of art is a constant, and a continuous job to reveal visually the attitude of our mentality. And the less we disturb the influence of our mentality the more I believe we come close to the truth.

If one says “Red” (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.

I paint the way I spread butter on pumpernickel.

When we were in the seminary we got a stipend direct from the government and for that stipend we had an obligation to stick to our teaching job for five years.

In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.

A thing is never seen as it really is.

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.

Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see.

As basic rules of a language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over. New and different cases will be discovered time and again.

Learn to see and to feel life; that is, cultivate imagination, because there are still marvels in the world, because life is a mystery and always will be. But be aware of it.

I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

Therefore art means: you have to believe, to have faith, that is, cultivate vision.

Easy-to know that diamonds-are precious, Good-to learn that rubies-have depth, But more-to see that pebbles-are miraculous.

And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.

I start from experience and read. . .always between polarities - loud and not-loud, young and old, spring and winter. If I can make black and white behave together instead of shooting at each other only, I feel proud.

My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know.

Art is concerned with the HOW and not the WHAT.

Apprentice is the beginner - the first years you work in a craft in the European sense you are an apprentice. That takes 3 or 4 years. Then you are a journeyman. You can go from one master to another and learn other tricks and other secrets.

What has been said does not simply belong to us.

I was for years in the yellow period, you know.

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

It's the only dish I serve my craziness for color in.

The purpose of art is to re-present nature, not represent it.

We never really perceive what color really is, as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.

We never really perceive what color is physically!

Independent of harmony rules, any color 'goes' or 'works' with any other color, presupposing that their quantities are appropriate.

Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art.

I've handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.

I do not like to be a prophet. I like better to paint than to predict what the next painters will do. Though I have a feeling that consideration of order is very much in the air.

Color deceives continuously.

I prefer to see with closed eyes.

I love very much to draw animals.

If you don't do it my way, I suggest you commit suicide.

Every perception of color is an illusion, we do not see colors as they really are. In our perception they alter one another.

As we do not see squares in nature, I thought that it is man-made. But I have corrected myself. Because squares exist in salt crystals, our daily salt.

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

Just as the unmusical ear is not competent to judge music, so it is likewise with pictures, whether they are paintings, drawings or photos. Only a sensitive and trained eye gives us the right to judge.

I count all the time on resonance. I call on this, you see.

It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe, you see. To be a painter was terrible.

I'm not a talker. I'm a formulator.

I have invented the Thermometer style.

In Italy the artist is a god. Now if the artist is a god, the scientist is likewise a god.

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.

I want color and form to have contradictorily functions.

To design is to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. In short it embraces all means of opposing disorder and accident. Therefore it signifies a human need and qualifies man’s thinking and doing.

Art problems are problems of human relationship.

Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.

I think art parallels life; it is not a report on nature or on intimate disclosure of inner secrets. Color, in my opinion, behaves like man -- in two distinct ways: first in self-realization and then in the realization of relationships with others.