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Note from the Atelier September 26, 2026 Hi There Reader... I started this week's article thinking it would be a two-parter. I'd make my little art book, send it off to be printed and report back later on whether the experiment actually worked. But lo and behold, the shipping stars aligned. The book arrived exactly one week after I ordered it, just in time for me to finish the story before this newsletter went out. And since we seem to be talking about books this week, I'm continuing the theme with Josef Albers' Interaction of Color, an art book that unexpectedly transported me back to my college engineering days. Books, art and Boolean logic. Apparently that's where we are this week. Cheers!

P.S. If you enjoy my writing here, I've started writing over on Substack, too. Meet is where I'm sharing observations and musings across art, travel, books, museums, life and whatever else I run across that's too interesting to ignore. Everything is free to read, so feel free to wander over, look around and subscribe if you'd like.

Wander over to Meet on Substack

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I Made My Own Art Book. (Am I an Author Now?)

Turning my museum photos into an art book.

I buy a lot of art books.

Some are reference books. Some are about a particular artist. Some are exhibition catalogs. Others are big surveys covering an entire movement or period. I enjoy them. (Maybe I have a problem, but that's a topic for another day...)

Lately, I've been working on developing my abstract painting, and the thing I struggle with most is composition.

I can find oodles of abstract art online. I can scroll through Instagram or Pinterest for five minutes and see hundreds of examples. But are they good? I don't always know.

I know whether I like them, but that's different.

I want to develop my ability to look at an abstract composition and understand why it works, or why it doesn't. Why does one arrangement of shapes and marks feel balanced while another doesn't? Why does my eye move around one painting and get stuck in another? Or better, how do I know if my eye naturally moves around or if I intentionally move it around?

So I want to look at a lot of good abstract art.

Museums seemed like a pretty good place to start.

That's not to say that everything hanging in a museum is automatically good, or that we're all supposed to like it, particularly abstract art. (TBH, I still struggle with Pollock.) But somebody decided it was worthy of being displayed in a museum. It has passed through some sort of filter beyond likes, followers and algorithms.

I want to study that work.

And then I realized something. I've been collecting photos of artwork for years. I'm that overzealous person in the museum taking a picture of everything! (And often, not just one picture :/ )

I photograph the things that catch my eye. Sometimes it's an entire painting. Sometimes I get closer to capture a particular section, a brushstroke, a color combination or some tiny detail I want to remember.

When I leave the museum, the photos join the thousands of other photos on my phone and in the cloud and I rarely look at them again. Instead, I buy another art book, which seems kinda silly.

On a recent trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, I visited Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury. I loved the exhibition and photographed essentially the entire thing.

When I got home, I started flipping through the pictures on my phone and had an idea. What if I created my own book with these photos? I certainly see plenty of those create-your-own-photo-book ads on social media.

So, I kept it simple; I made it for me. I wanted a book I could pick up and look at, an old-fashioned picture book. Something I could flip through when I'm thinking about composition, color, mark-making or simply trying to figure out why something isn't working.

And because these are photographs I took myself, there's another filter at work. These aren't simply abstract paintings somebody decided I ought to study. These are works I actually stood in front of and wanted to remember. They're also works that somebody decided were worthy of displaying in a museum.

I ended up with 58 pages from one exhibition, printed as a softcover 8 x 10 book. I resisted every urge I had to overdesign it because the art is the point.

To give you a real-life timeline: I visited the Art Institute on Saturday, September 12th. I created the book and placed the order on Thursday, September 17th (it cost me $31, including regular shipping). It showed up on my doorstep exactly one week later, Thursday, September 24th. Actually, two copies showed up, even though I only ordered one. I'm not complaining.

I'm really happy with it!

The photographs reproduced well, the matte paper feels good and, most importantly, it feels like a little art book rather than a photo album. I kept the pages simple: a photograph of the artwork and enough information to identify it. That's really all I wanted.

Is it perfect? Of course not. A few of my photographs are darker than I would like, which I now realize was an issue with the original photos (user error!), not the printing. The title on the spine is just a smidge too large. And I might prefer the whole book to be a little smaller, although that's really just personal preference.

But those are pretty minor quibbles for a first attempt.

And I've already picked it up and flipped through it, which was the entire point.

The other thing I didn't anticipate was how many other possibilities this would open up.

I mentioned the book to a group of artist friends this week, and they immediately loved the idea. We started talking about making books of our own artwork, both as a record for ourselves and perhaps as a gift for a longtime collector.

Then I started thinking about all the other museum photographs sitting in my cloud. The National Portrait Gallery. The National Gallery. The Hirshhorn. The Centre Pompidou. The Modern Wing at the Art Institute.

Perhaps I can stop buying so many art books.

Okay, probably not.

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Color Theory, QED.

I recently read Josef Albers’ classic book Interaction of Color. It’s fascinating! And I don’t mean that in a Fifty Shades of Grey sort of way. In fact, for a book about color, there was very little resemblance to any other art or color books I've read. It reminded me of a math book. And not arithmetic. Not even algebra. I’m talking about the kind of math I encountered as a college junior majoring in computer science and electrical engineering. Advanced boolean logic. Theorems. Proofs. The sort of classes where you worked your way through a proposition step by step until, eventually, QED.

I wasn’t expecting to encounter that again in an art book. Frankly, in my retirement, I wasn't expecting to encounter that at all.

But that’s essentially what Albers does with color.

He demonstrates that colors behave differently depending on what surrounds them. One color can appear to be two different colors. Two different colors can appear to be the same. A color can look lighter, darker, warmer or cooler depending on its neighbors. Colors can appear transparent when they’re not.

And then he shows you.

Again and again.

Albers first developed these ideas through exercises with his students, eventually publishing Interaction of Color in 1963. His premise was that color is relative and continually deceives us. Rather than memorizing a system of color rules, he wanted students to learn by actually seeing what color does.

That’s where the book started feeling remarkably familiar to my former math brain.

Albers would make a proposition about how color behaves. I’d look at the accompanying example. Yep. Then he’d change a variable. Look again. Yep. Then he’d push the idea a little further.

Theory. Example. Proof.

QED.

Except instead of proving something with numbers or symbols, he was proving it with little rectangles of colored paper.

And I found it fascinating.

So yes, I recommend Interaction of Color.

But with a small warning.

If you’re looking for a breezy little book about which colors look pretty together, this isn’t it. You have to follow the logic. You have to look at the examples. Occasionally, you may have to stare at a couple of colored squares considerably longer than you expected.

For me, that was part of the fun.

Just remember to take off your rose-colored glasses first.

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