More on Albers: Despite Straight Lines

Easy – to know
that diamonds – are precious. 
Good – to learn
that rubies – have depth, 
but more – to see
that pebbles – are miraculous. 
-Josef Albers (Despite Straight Lines, page 82)

To design is 
to plan and to organize, to order, to relate and to control. 
In short it embraces 
all means opposing disorder and accident. 
Therefore it signifies 
a human need
and qualifies man's 
thinking and doing.
- Josef Albers (page 75)

"Rapid motion within seemingly stable systems has changed our daily way of life as well as our inner imagery. We sit in a car or in a plane while the landscape slips by. Rocks change their shape, rivers and roads change their course relative to our eyes. Facades rise while we approach, recede and decline while we go on. Matter, the matrix of being, has become a function of energy and its dynamic and infinite transformations.
This, then, is the world out of which the work of Albers grows and can present to us the relativity of our most basic experiences. Forced to test again and again all that we see, we learn to see more."
- Josef Albers: Despite Straight Lines by Francois Bucher (page 57)

Learning to see more... that's what it comes down to, isn't it? Training one's eyes to see what is there, rather than what the brain thinks it knows, is the basic tenant of all my beginning drawing classes. But it is also the root of my own studio practice as an observational painter. That search for truth - truth in the form of accurately seen shapes, forms, colors - when translated into paint becomes a record of existence, a documentation of a particular moment in time, an undeniable personal reality. I've said all this before, but it bears repeating. And anyway, Albers said it better. Go read his books. Stare at the illustrations until you see and understand the complex visual problems with which he grappled, and then realize that he solved these problems with the simplest and most direct element of art: the line.