What I'm watching/listening to this week
Josef Albers: To Open Eyes — Yale Film. A short documentary on Albers' teaching method, which was not theoretical. He gave students colored paper and had them see how the same color looks completely different depending on what's next to it. He called this "interaction." He meant it literally. What looks like two different colors can be one color, and what looks like one color can be two. I watch it at the start of any week I've been painting mechanically, on autopilot, reaching for the same combinations.
I have many mixing surfaces. Two are for studio work: the large Pike and the large enamel butcher tray, white, smooth, almost clinical. The others are for the mixing I need to think about: the porcelain nesting bowls, plastic salad bowls; all arranged by temperature — warm left, cool right, the neutrals in the center or gray mixes. I'll record a video on that!
The arrangement is not arbitrary.
The argument behind this is that warm colors and cool colors should have to earn the right to mix. If they are next to each other on the tray, I reach for them together without thinking, which means I'm mixing by habit rather than by decision. If there's physical distance — a neutral bowl between them — I choose before the brushes meet. The extra two seconds of deliberation are where the color thinking happens.
Josef Albers spent decades trying to demonstrate one idea: a color is never experienced alone. It is always modified by what surrounds it — on the canvas, on your face as makeup, in the eye, on the mixing surface. The grey I mix on the white butcher tray looks different from that grey on the cream paper. The pale yellow reads as near-white until I put it next to Prussian Blue. The warm sienna I mixed on the left of the tray looks cooler by the time it's on the brush, and I'm carrying it to the right side of the paper, where the blue washes are.
The palette is the first painting surface.
What happens on it shapes what happens on the paper. I used to ignore this. I mixed wherever there was space, reached for whatever was close, trusted that the color would solve itself once it hit the paper. It didn't. The decisions I didn't make on the palette became the problems I couldn't solve on the painting.
Now I set up the palettes before I begin. The nesting bowls hold the pre-mixed working colors for the session. The butcher tray is for the adjustments, the in-progress corrections, the fast mixes. They are two different types of thinking. They need two different surfaces.
What I read this week
Josef Albers, Interaction of Color — I return to this, usually when a palette has stopped working, and I can't diagnose why. His method: direct perception over theory. He doesn't tell you what colors go together; he builds the conditions under which you see what's actually happening. The book turned 60 years old recently, and Yale Press wrote about it.
The writing asks: why does a book about color still work when we can reproduce color digitally with the accuracy Albers never had? Because color perception is not a reproduction problem. It is still, and always, a relationship problem.
What I love this week
Enamel Butcher Tray — 7x10.5 inches
White enamel, smooth surface, large enough to mix freely without colors crowding each other. I use this as the main working surface for each session: in-progress mixes in the center, test strokes at the edges before the brush goes near the paper. The white surface shows you the true color, not the color modified by a grey or off-white plastic tray, which is a small error that compounds across every decision in the session. It cleans in thirty seconds. I have used plastic palettes, salad bowls, ceramic palettes, porcelain tiles, even a glass cutting board. The enamel butcher tray is one of the best, and it's sturdy.
Jack Richeson Porcelain 6 Small Nesting Bowls
For mixing that requires thought: specific colors pre-mixed for a session, colors I'm building across multiple painting days, or the careful color chemistry a new series requires. Each bowl is deep enough to mix without the color climbing the sides. Porcelain, so the reading is accurate. The nesting is useful for storage between sessions — they stack without spilling, which means a pre-mixed color can wait for you from one day to the next without skinning over or evaporating. I use these alongside the butcher tray, and my large Pike, not instead of it. Together they cover everything from fast working decisions to the deliberate building of a series palette.
Other Internet Love plucked from the Garden of e-Delights:
- Interaction of Color — 60 Years On — Yale University Press — the anniversary essay on Albers' book. Why direct perception still can't be theorized away, and why a book with no digital color management still teaches color better than software. Start here before you buy the book.
- The Book on Color That Never Fades — Yale News — profiles the continued use of Albers' method in art and design education globally. Also contains a link to the digital app version, which is the most accessible way to experience his exercises directly.
- Color Theory Part 4: Mixing Paint — Muddy Colors — the practical diagnosis: where does muddy happen, and why? Written by working illustrators, not theorists. The series is worth reading in order; the fourth part is specifically about what goes wrong in mixing and how to trace it back to the decision you didn't make.
- And another book I can't live without, but I'll tell you about it next time I release a class. Patience!
What I'm working on, studio bits.
Setting up a more systematic palette after my long sessions with grays and blacks. I've identified five colors that recur across the paintings, and I'm pre-mixing them at the start of each session rather than improvising from scratch. The nesting bowls hold the series palette. The butcher tray handles the adjustments. The goal: the series reads unified without every painting looking identical, which is a mixing problem before it's anything else. Still working out the relationships. Good sign.
"Color is the most relative medium in art." — Josef Albers
