Albers' Bluest Blue

In a previous post (Inspired by... Josef Albers), I wrote about my first encounter with the work of German born visual artist Josef Albers. Albers' work on color, particularly in his book Interaction of Color, emphasizes color's relativity and instability, capacity to decive, ability to evoke different readings in different contexts. Intensity, placement, boundaries, recurrence, and extent all influence how a color is perceived and how it interacts with other colors in a composition. Albers wants his audience to learn to see how colors can act and relate to one another. His method "places practice before theory," and aims to cultivate sight that is closely linked with imagination and fantasy.

My Homage to Albers: Bluest Blue

I am eager to learn from Albers for my own work as a quilter. The first of Albers' practical exercises I chose to quilt is an exercise in color intensity, specifically in perceiving brightness (Interaction of Color pp. 16-17). Albers' years as a teacher taught him that it is a relatively easy matter to train a group of artists to perceive light and dark gradations uniformly. But when it comes to brightness? It's not so simple.

We each have different preferences, different tastes, and colors we just don't like. Our preferences change with mood, or with stages in life. A color we can't stand one year, we may fall in love with once we begin to truly understand how it works, how it interacts, what depths and heights it is capable of (browns, anyone?).

Albers sought to cultivate this understanding by having students sort "all possible shades and tints within a hue" and then choose the hue they considered "most typical": reddest red, yellowest yellow. The study I chose to reproduce is Albers' rendition of an exercise in choosing "the bluest blue."

Josef Albers' exercise in color intensity - brightness: "the bluest blue"

My quilt, pictured above, doesn't reproduce Albers' tints and shades exactly, but I tried to replicate them as closely as I could with the colors I had in my stash.

Albers states, somewhat enigmatically, that "the most typical hue...is placed within the group accordingly." That is, we're supposed to be able to spot it based on its prominence within the composition. My eye - in Albers' composition and in my quilt, is drawn to the third blue from the bottom. Is it a coincidence that looks like Duke blue to me?

improvised quilt back

For the quilt back, I used scraps from the blues used on the front of the quilt along with a variety of whites and off-whites, including scraps from the background fabric I used for the quilt top. I improvised the piecing to create a modern composition that re-scrambles Albers' sorted tints and shades. My off-grid composition was pieced in five columns of uneven widths. These widths were largely determined by the size of the scrap I was using, a wonderful constraint that minimized planning and let serendipity rule the results.

detail of echo quilting on quilt back

For the quilting, I echoed the blocks on the front of the quilt. I used the upper feed dog on my walking foot as a guide for spacing the echo-lines. This method yielded quilting lines that are roughly 1/4" apart. I absolutely love the textured effect from the dense quilting (see detail of quilt back). That said, the quilting was a labor-intensive process requiring many hours to complete. The dimensions of this quilt were 51" x 60". It would have been difficult to complete wrangle a larger quilt using this method on my home machine.

In my next post I'll share a work in progress (aka "how I fell in love with browns"). In the meantime, happy quilting, crafting, reading, painting, dancing, writing, digging, building. And enjoy this beautiful spring day!