It should be clear by now that our way of studying color does not start with the past – neither with works of the past nor with its theories.
As we begin principally with the material, color itself, and its action and interaction as registered in our minds, we practice first and mainly a study of ourselves.
Thus, we replace looking backward by looking first at ourselves and our surroundings.
Though our own development and our own work are closest to us, we see and appreciate encouragement from achievements of the past, and gratefully pay practical respect to their originators as often as the opportunity arises.
To honor the masters creatively is to compete with their attitude rather than their results, to follow an artistic understanding of tradition – that is, to create, not to revise.
Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, Yale U. Press, 1963
Mirror to the Flower 