When I was a kid, I was confused as to why Josef Albers got to have a career as an artist, and my mother didn’t. “All he’s doing is putting together a bunch of squares?” I thought, “But I was doing that in pre-school.” What I was unaware of at the time was the fact that Josef Albers was a color-theory genius, and that my mom was merely a mediocre figure-painter.
Albers usually painted on Masonite. He used a palette knife with oil paints and often wrote down the colors that he used on the back of the canvases. Each painting in his most famous series, “Homage to the Square,” consists of either three or four squares of solid planes of color nested within one another, in one of four different arrangements and in square formats ranging from 16 inches by 16 inches, to 4 foot by 4 foot paintings.
When I later became an interior decorator, I learned to appreciate Albers sensibility in a new way. Albers was trying to redefine and play with “art” at a very deep level–they were exploring & trying to redefine the basics of color theory and composition.
Before you get too obsessed with specifics of content when you’re decorating–“I’ll use books to decorate“–you have to master the basics of composition and color theory. At least that’s been my experience.
For those who are just familiarizing themselves with the basics of color theory and design composition–our infographic below should be very helpful to you!
This infographic is presented bySign.com