I have handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.- Josef Albers
I am not a talker. I am a formulator.
I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.
I was for years in the yellow period, you know.
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.
I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.
I prefer to see with closed eyes.
I love very much to draw animals.
I have taught my students not to apply rules or mechanical ways of seeing.
I have invented the Thermometer style.
I count all the time on resonance. I call on this, you 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.
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.
Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.
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.
