Alcalay is now 86 years old. He has a wide face and frame and white hair that encircles his large head in a cloud-like wisp. Some years ago he had a double bypass, and the steady toll of macular degeneration over the years have made him legally blind. He reads with the aid of a scanning device that magnifies words from a page on a television monitor, each word filling up almost the entire screen.

He retired from teaching in 1997 and since 1986, the VES department has awarded the Albert Alcalay Award to the best student in a workshop studio.

Blindness has also become a milestone. The light that reaches Alcalay’s eyes has diminished by as much as 50 percent. For years, he has had trouble distinguishing between blue and green. “I was teaching the other colors,” he says.

Now Alcalay paints with even greater abstraction—what he calls “shaping the white” or using color as markers for the blurred light he is able to perceive.

Decades after his initiation into the world of self-exploration, Alcalay still has much to discover and express. Alcalay says that Tranchin and Moore should not be short of material to document in their biography, and the film “should be another couple of hours.”

—Staff writer Lily X. Huang can be reached at lxhuang@fas.harvard.edu.