Just.

Joseph Albers “Albums” Album Cover Designs at the Minus Project Space, Brooklyn

I missed this show featuring Josef Albers’ designs for the covers of the Command Records.

This label’s releases are described as…

“…the most unusual record you have ever put on your turntable. It is a unique mixture of entertainment, excitement, beauty and practicality.” — Persuasive Percussion (1959) liner notes

My kind of music.

More from the gallery overview:

Command Records was founded in 1959 by Enoch Light (1905-1978), a classical violinist, bandleader, and sound recording engineer. Light went to extraordinary technical lengths, and often great expense, to create recordings of the absolute highest quality possible that took full advantage of new technical capabilities of home audio equipment in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Light specifically perfected stereo effects that bounced sounds between the right and left channel speakers, which was called a “ping-pong effect”.

On each album sleeve, Light would include lengthy technical descriptions about each song, the musicians, the depth and breadth of the sounds, and how they were recorded. In order to fit his descriptions, he doubled the size of a standard album sleeve and enabled it to fold open like a book, thereby inventing the gatefold-packaging format. The gatefold sleeve became highly popular in following decades.

Luckily there’s some great images on the gallery site. Josef Albers was a graphic artist but his massive influence on the profession was through his educational programs, such as his excellent color theory book, Interaction of Color.

A Fine Line Between Love and Fear

I was listening to Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview that she did in 2003 with Maurice Sendak, author of a trilogy that includes Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen and Outside, Over There. I was struck by his description of the monsters actually being inspired by memories of his older family members, who would come to dinner at his home in Brooklyn and with their hairy noses and moles and big ears would bore him to death at the dinner table with their meaningless dribble and hungry eyes waiting for his mom’s outrageously slow cooked food.

This juxtaposition between loving human connection and fearsome beasts seemed to capture the strange sense that Sendak’s characters don’t really fall easily into any one black or white space in our minds, but rather a blur across that spectrum of love and hate.

This morning I came across the paintings of Austin Power on the Behance Network. Specifically, his new series, titled “21 Portraits of People I Miss“. There’s a longing and sadness to his work that’s obvious, but also a serious and controlled discipline in these seemingly unfinished works, and a use of colors that really strike a chord with me as entirely contemporary and modern. Wonderful work and even more wonderful because they’re watercolors.

His show is opening tomorrow at Satsko, 245 Eldridge St., New York, NY 10002. 6-9pm.

View a selection of his work from this particular show.
View his portfolio online.