two from the ultimate painter's painter...

march 25, 1965
being fascinated by process, i have to acceed to and fight through all the processes involved in painting or drawing or whatever. in drawing the small pencil studies, for instance, i have a positive and very real - and lasting (it never flags) delight in overcoming the grain of the paper for my ends. this leads only too easily to some sort of "fix" on the process - and in times of confusion and weakness of purpose it can take over. but i cannot overcome this by simply saying to myself to myself that i must play down the process - overlook, for instance, areas where the paper is particularly recalcitrant, and go on to the "next" thing. once i've even become aware of something wrong - a weakness in the drawing where the process is not working wholly to my ends, that has to be changed, no matter how unnoticeable to anyone else, no matter what! not because hte drawing couldn't, possibly, be completed satisfactorily without doing it, but because i can't even see what else there is to be done until i have done it!

october 25, 1965
i believe that flatness (as of the canvas, for instance) is something we never see, but only know. the eyes are not constructed to see flatness, and we come nearer knowing it through the sense of touch. if this is true, the basis of our apprehension of a painting has a duality of see-touch, or maybe better - touch-see, which sets up what is probably the primary, vivifying tension on the basis of which the "living" - the "created" quality of a painting depends.

if this is so, is this why i must pay such endless and infinite attention to the topography of the paint on my canvas?

from the journals of myron stout

myron stout on josef albers...

"... i suppose albers came to his purism out of de stijl and kandinsky, and with the strong touch of 19th century scientific idealism which brought such a strong pragmatic note to the bauhaus - together, of course, with the german mystical-metaphysical idealism.

the earlier purists were so much more the poets and the mystics in their work than any now practicing and these are the very qualities which gave their work more validity (together, of course, with greater artistry) than that of the ones now practicing. i include albers, of course, with the earlier ones, though i can not feel him the artist that mondrian was, of course. he certainly does have the transcendental ideal, though, and he not only does not lose it with increasing age, but seems to strengthen and clarify it. his work always gives me pause, because the scientifically "measured" quality always stops me (at least momentarily - and sometimes blocks me) on the way "through" his work to what he has to say or present. on the other hand i always come again and again to a great admiration for the consistent and truly integrally held vision which impels him and is, on the whole, revealed in his work. that he can hold it is very remarkable, for it's almost as though he were a man out of his time - he should have lived a generation earlier when the materialism and lack of faith and conviction of today would not have been there to beat on him and his audience. the solitariness of his powerful idealism would have been easier to bear, so to speak, had he come to full flower in 1900 or 1910 instead of now. i think possibly he has not been able to reconcile his ideals with the world he finds himself in - his work is not embracingly "telling" enough. but he still holds to the basic - to the fundamental of what he knows will give expression to what he means."

april 28, 1960

top: josef albers hommage to the square
bottom: myron stout, 1950