Creativity Quote by Josef Albers

“I prefer to see with closed eyes” is a provocation disguised as a calm preference: Albers doesn’t reject vision, he distrusts it. Coming from an artist who spent decades turning color into a kind of laboratory instrument, the line is less mystical than methodological. Close your eyes and you strip away the world’s distractions, the labels that cling to objects, the inherited “knowledge” of what a color or shape is supposed to do. What’s left is perception as an event - unstable, relational, easily tricked.

That’s classic Albers. In his teaching at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale, he trained students to treat seeing as a skill rather than a gift: compare, isolate, test. His square paintings are famous not for virtuoso brushwork but for how brutally they expose the unreliability of the eye. Colors shift depending on neighbors; “facts” become context. The closed eye becomes a metaphor for shutting out the automatic read, the first lazy interpretation, so a more rigorous kind of looking can emerge.

The subtext is also a quiet rebuke to modern life’s visual glut. Albers lived through the rise of mass media, advertising, and a culture increasingly engineered to grab attention. Preferring to “see” without seeing implies an insistence on inner calibration: memory, afterimage, imagination, the private theater where perception gets edited before it becomes belief. It’s not anti-reality; it’s anti-certainty. In Albers’s world, the most honest vision begins by admitting how little the eye can be trusted.