Equally intriguing is that he applied the color with a palette knife. With scrupulous care. I think one must see the paintings to begin to understand this.

O.K. I went back to Albers images with the in-the-tube in mind and can see where he may have done just that. But what was his point? To collect tubes of paint? Did it have a didactic function?

See http://www.minusspace.com/tag/josef-albers/

Here’s a quote from that link:
“Throughout the series, also known as the Adobe paintings, Albers used a similar composition with varying colour combinations, applying paint unmixed, directly from the tube onto white primed hardboard.”

I don’t know if the screen prints he made were based on the paintings, or developed as separate images.

In all these images a central issue is the spatial reading…does the red advance or recede? Which depends on whether you read the red as a transparent plane over the orange, or the orange as a ‘translucent’ sheet over the red. There is not a ‘correct’ reading.

Also, the term hue refers to thew redness/yellowness/blueness of a color, and is fairly objective. Even in very grayed (low saturated colors) there is general agreement in observers about which appears redder, or greener, or whatever. BUT…only when they are presented on neutral fields for comparison. When surrounded by other colors they are very subject to being changed in appearance.

Today we have Photoshop. What once was quite difficult, or took time consuming trial and error can be accomplished easily using Photoshops simple drawing tools. The paintings by artists like Noland, Albers, Vasarely, Riley and even Al Held were difficult to construct and color more than 20 years ago. Today one can fool around with “stripe paintings” on the computer creating endless variations in an afternoon.

As a tool, drawing programs allow the painter to create simple mockups and quickly test out the visual effects of various color palettes. I doubt that it will make a better painting but sometimes you can solve a painting problem on the computer

This also touches on Steve’s comments about the difficulty in achieving accurate color output. Anything capable of producing or recording color has what is called a “color gamut” which is by definition the contained range of the producible or reproducible colors. Paint has a color gamut, so do inks and the two are closer to one another than the gamut of film, or digital recording and displaying devices. The cyan blue on a monitor RGB 0,255,255 is not reproducible with most inks, it is lighter and more saturated. By contrast, a pthalo cyan blue is not reproducible on a display device, it is too dark and saturated. In fact RGB 0,255,255 only means something on a particular display or recording device and is not the same on a different device (it’s possible to calibrate printers, scanners and displays to smooth over the rough spots) Because the artist typically is daisy chaining several input and output devices together, this process can get very complicated very fast.

In the end, what matters is how the final output looks, not how you get there.