"For several years I kept in my archive as working material some pieces of paper shaded different colours with gouache. ... I will not list the chain of previous owners of these swatches, but only name their creator -- Valida Delakroa (1899-1972). ... Valida Delakroa in 1922 entered VKhUTEIN (the Higher Artistic and Technical Institute, as the fomer Imperial Academy of Arts in Petrograd was then known) and the studio of Mikhail Vasilyevich Matiushin (1861-1934) - an artist, musician, educator and researcher into the psycho-physiology of the perception of art. ... I was driven by a desire to not only give new life to [Delakroa's color swatches] by employing them in my own work, but also to use Mikhail Matiushin's laboratory experiments. ... The semantic and compositional centre of each page in my album is a blank section of paper onto which a few of the original gouache swatches were pasted. The colour scheme was constructed from the material to hand. ... In contrast to the original my work is printed lithographically, a process that uses oil-based inks rather than gum paints. In order to get close to the colour of the time-yellowed paper, I used through-coloured light-ochre Rives BFK print-making paper, while the addition of opaque white to the lithographic ink made it possible to obtain a matte 'velvety' surface like the gouache."--English introduction
