Gail Wight: Windswept

November 3, 2015

From our partners at Art Practical, today we bring you Gail Wight’s meditation on wind. Wight writes: “I began to understand that the color and texture, the hue and saturation of the sky—or of the ocean swell, the arching trees, the rippling seaweed—are constructed largely by the presence, or absence, of the otherwise invisible wind.” This article was originally published in Issue 7.2, Art, Science, and Wonder, on October 29, 2015.

 
On my bookshelf is a dog-eared and ragged copy of Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, the “revised pocket edition” from Yale University Press. I picked up this small paperback at a second-hand store in Boston in 1986. It came with a tiny packet of colored paper chips and a few loose leaves for comparing colors. I’ve always loved this little treasure.

The original version was published in 1963 as a glorious set of one hundred fifty silk-screens, with die-cut overlaid pages and accompanying text, all within a slipcase. Yale describes it as “a masterwork in art education.” It’s been in print ever since, and celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2013 with a beautiful, clothbound, two-volume edition.