The Philosopher’s Stone, or, Painting Chemistry
Chemistry and painting have always gone hand in hand. We should recall and highlight the importance of that relationship, as we bring the “A” for art into “STEM” (science, technology, engineering, math) to yield “STEAM.”
Latest case in point:
The resulting blue pigment, nearly perfect in spectral terms and with sought-after near-infrared qualities, became available to artists in 2016.
Meanwhile, industry will also use the compound. For instance, AMD will use YInMn Blue on its new graphic processing units, both for the unique hue and for energy efficiencies stemming from the IR properties.
The intimate dance between art and technology, specifically painting and chemistry, has gone on from our origins. As physicist, and consulting editor for Nature, Philip Ball notes in his comprehensive and insightful book Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (2001):
“For as long as painters have fashioned their visions and dreams into images, they have relied on technical knowledge and skill to supply their materials. With the blossoming of the chemical sciences in the early nineteenth century it became impossible to overlook this fact: chemistry was laid out there on the artist’s palette.” (page 4).
Please read Ball for timely reminders that, for Da Vinci and his colleagues in the European Renaissance, for the seventeenth-century Dutch, for Turner in the first half of the nineteenth century, for the Bauhaus practitioners, STEAM was the norm, not something new. Follow the story of how non-toxic white paints were derived from zinc smelting, how new yellows and greens came from experiments with chlorine compounds and copper arsenite, how the discovery of coal-tar derivatives created aniline dyes in unprecedented purples, magentas, fuchsias. In Ball’s telling, great chemists such as Scheele, von Liebig, Hofman, and Perkin figure alongside great painters such as Veronese, Titian, Monet, Cezanne, and Van Gogh.
The story continues to the present, with Helen Frankenthaler’s color field innovations beginning in the 1950s, the landmark publication in 1963 of Josef Albers’ Interaction of Color, with Yves Klein registering a patent for his “International Klein Blue,” with Bridget Riley in 1967 starting her decades-long color form explorations, with Anish Kapoor in 1981 sculpting in raw red & yellow pigments and in 2016 securing sole artistic rights to use the blackest black ever produced (used for stealth satellites, reflecting almost no light at all), with Odili Donald Odita’s ongoing murals and other large installations, with Syed Haider Raza’s blend of tradition with modernist geometries.
Modern design & manufacture focuses heavily on the “interaction of color,” especially as a competitive advantage in the consumer marketplace -- think of Jobs and Ives at Apple, with their highly successful chromatic approach to the user experience. Think too of Pantone, the not-so-gray eminence behind the world of consumer products (by the way, “Rose Quartz” and “Serenity” were together Pantone’s “Color of the Year” in 2016).
Bringing us right up to today, with a clearly recognized and very strong link to the past, is the Sikkens Foundation in The Netherlands, sponsored by global chemical giant AkzoNobel. Founded in 1792 as a paint and varnish factory, Sikkens now awards one of the most important global awards for the use of color in the arts.
Painting chemistry!
By Daniel Rabuzzi, Executive Director, Mouse
