A tool for Josef Albers

This weekend I finally saw that fantastic Anni + Josef Albers expo in the Art Museum in Den Haag. I was amazed by the incredible woven patterns and fantastic graphic work by Anni Albers. It is just so good, I can only wish to one day be able to make work that’s inspired by her. But since the expo was so good I just had to make something based on what I had seen. So I ended up with the much less complex work that Josef used to make. Maybe one day in the future I’ll dare to get inspired by Anni Albers’ work.

I noticed that in the earlier years Josef Albers would sometimes recreate the same painting, with the same shapes, and the same palette, but he would shift the colours of the shapes. Making these different paintings must have taken ages, especially if he wanted to test all possible colour combinations. So, naively, I can’t help but think that he might have appreciated a tool that would have generated all these possible combinations. It could have helped him, I guess, with picking the best combinations, the ones that should be painted.

So at home I wrote a simple PHP script that generates the possible forms that follow the logic of this one painting I liked a lot. The shapes on this painting remind me of bottles, and one of the shapes I’ve been playing around with lately is bottles. Only Albers’s bottles are so incredibly beautiful. It is a wonderful shape. It looks like two, or even three separate shapes, but it is just one very clever line. I recreated the shape using SVG, and then played around with PHP to generated all different coordinates that still look like Albers’s shapes. There’s not very many of them, it’s just six different patterns. So I randomised some coordinates, so in the end all shapes are still unique.

In all my previous work I used to just generate random colours. But Josef and Anni Albers never used random colours, they were very deliberate in their choice. Josef Albers was an absolute expert on what he called the interaction of colour, how colours behave when you combine them with other colours. He didn’t need random, he knew very well what he was doing. So I simply nicked all schemes with four colours that he used for his paintings. Well, probably not all of them, just 30 that I could find. And now, every time you refresh this page, it shows all 24 possible ways to paint this painting with a particular four colour colour scheme.

So there you have it, a simple tool that generates lots and lots of versions of the same painting. The title suggests it is a tool for Josef Albers, but I think he did great without it. Let’s call it what it is: just another tool for myself.