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!

Inspired by... Josef Albers

Josef Albers, Interaction of Color

I recently watched a webinar called "Modern Quilting: Know It When You See It" by modern quilter Jacquie Gering, on the Modern Quilt Guild  members' site. Jacquie's presentation addressed the question "What is Modern Quilting?" and mapped a spectrum from traditional to modern. One influence she named for modern quilting is modern art. In my own attempt to better understand what defines modern quilting, I thought it would help me to better understand the history of modern art and design.

Josef Albers, Homage to the Square 

My first stop in this journey of discovery was the work of Josef Albers. Like my mother's family, Albers was a German Catholic who emigrated to the United States during the Nazi regime. Before leaving Germany, Albers was a professor at the Bauhaus from 1922 to 1933, specializing in furniture design and stained glass, a medium that has much in common with quilting. After immigrating to the United States, from 1933 to 1949 he directed the painting program at the newly opened art school Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, NC. In 1950 Albers joined Yale University's department of design, which he chaired. He remained in New Haven for the remainder of his life. I share aspects of identity and place with Albers. What most drew me to his work, however, was his focus on color.

Josef Albers, Transparency

Albers paintings are "quilterly", and to me they beg to be interpreted in fabric and thread. I am not trained in art, but I have ordered Josef Albers' influential book Interaction of Color with every expectation that it will serve as a primer for me in my experiments with color as a quilter while also helping me gain a greater understanding of the modernist aesthetic.

After finishing my Carolina Blues quilt top, I wanted to make a quilt back for it that used the same color scheme: a spectrum of dark and light blues paired with neutrals. Because my fabric purchases are predominantly scraps, remnants, and the occasional irresistible fat quarter bundle, I don't have a lot of yardage for single-fabric backings, and usually default to a pieced backing. The Josef Albers color study on the left, below, from Interaction of Color, seemed just the thing. 

Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, v-3

I aimed for a simple rendering. That is, I didn't use Albers' piece to inspire a new design, but attempted to recreate his design in a different medium. My hope is that as I become more familiar with his work and the principles behind it, my own designs will use his work as a foundation rather than a template. 

For this piece, I worked from an 8"x10" color print-out, pictured below. 

My construction notes

Based on my estimate of the amount of background fabric I would need and the amount I actually had, I set a scale in which 1 cm on the print-out would equal 2.6" in the quilt. I kept a calculator handy to help me gauge where to position each block and how much background fabric to put where. I determined that the blue blocks would be 8" x 32" finished or 8.5" by 32.5" cut. I used a protractor to measure angles in the original design and to replicate them in the positioning of the blocks. I made up my methods as I went along, which meant there were a lot of mistakes, and not all of the angles or block positions replicate those in Albers' original. 

The overlapping of blue blocks created some particular construction challenges for me because I cut the blue blocks whole at the beginning of the project (a few were pieced because of the dimensions of the fabric remnants I had at hand). If I did a similar design in the future, I would plan to piece some of the blocks during construction to better accomodate the overlapping, particularly in the second block from the bottom and from the top.

As it happened, I did not have enough of the background fabric to make a quilt back for the Carolina Blues quilt, so I have decided to make this Homage to Albers into a quilt of its own. It does not want to lie quite flat (though as I look at this picture, I am hoping it isn't quite as puckered as it appears!), so I will need to make some tucks before I attempt to baste and quilt it, but I am still very happy with the results.

Pick Your Blue: Homage to Albers

What modern artists have inspired your quilts?