CHEMISTRY AND ART SITE MAP

CLASS DOCUMENTS:   STRUCTURE AND POLICIES

GENERAL CHEMISTRY TOPICS

TOPICS RELATED TO PROJECTS

INTRODUCTION TO CHEM 107: CHEMISTRY AND ART.

Visitors to this page who are not taking the course should realize that the information here is primarily intended for the students in the course. Downloading some of these pages from remote sites may be tediously long.

RATIONALE

I believe that chemistry and art share some common ground. First there is the fact that large parts of the practices of both artists and chemists take place in the physical realm. Both scientist and artist experiment with physical materials; The artist or chemist must spend time and effort learning (often by "mistake") about the properties of materials. Making observations about which colors result from mixing particular pigments, allows the painter to make useful predictions. On its face, this bears remarkable resemblance to the way the experimental process is carried out by chemists. Thus, in the technological realm, chemists and artists both explore ways to manipulate matter in order to achieve desired ends. (This common interest in the properties of matter explains how St. Luke, the physician, came to be the patron saint of both painters and chemists.)

In addition, chemistry and art both ask questions about the nature of the universe. They each approach questions that have unknowable answers from different perspectives, art from a more internal, experiential perspective and science by an external, experimental method. Regardless of their means, both fields seek to find and express some truths about the world. nse of which pigments mix well to produce certain colors, which will give muddy colors or bright colors. In our class project, I want you to get some of the experience of being the painter who uses his eyes to tell him which mixtures of pigments will give useful colors for making paint. I also want you to be the chemist, who can use a conceptual model to explain why some new colors in our wheels are muddy and others aren't. Ultimately, we would like to be able to predict the color that would result from mixing two pigments.

Let's consider for a moment the notion that the colors we see most of the time are the result of some sort of filters subtracting portions of the spectrum. If we had something that would take all of the RED out of WHITE LIGHT, the only two types of cones that would be stimulated in our eyes would be theose sensitive to the green and blue regions and we would see cyan. A cartoon of the three ideal subtractive filters that remove just the red or just the blue or just the green are shown at the right.

What would happen if, there were two filters in sequence?