Blue plastic trash bag in a park
This week I read a fascinating post at Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings site – The Magic and Logic of Color. She refers to a classic book by Josef Albers called Interaction of Color.*
Albers is an abstract painter and expert on color theory. The whole article is worth reading. But I was most struck by Alber’s thoughts on visual perception and seeing, as told to Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
He would stop and look at the world, look at the smallest object, smallest event, and see through it in a deep kind of way. He would see magic, he would see something deeper. And he believed that the majority of people just missed the true reality — it was available for everyone to see, but nobody was looking.
And …
Easy to know that diamonds are precious. Good to learn that rubies have depth. But more to see that pebbles are miraculous.
Resources
* Interaction of Color can be downloaded via an iPad app
Video about Joseph Albers Homage to the Square by Dick Nelson
Joseph Albers work on Art.net
That blue plastic trash bag is astonishing and the colours are beautiful and so reminiscent of water. It just goes to show that what we see is not always what we think we see!
Interesting links on Joseph Albers. I had not heard of this artist before.
This is an amazing image of such a mundane object – you found an ocean in the park.
Well said!