| BRIGHT
EARTH Philip Ball |
7:30
p.m. Presented in partnership with the Center for the Humanities, and the College of Engineering. |
|
|
|
| One of the often neglected components of art
is what it is made from: paint. Where did artists get their colors from,
and how have changes in the availability selection of colors over the ages
affected the way that artists paint? Today, when there are masses of colors
available off the shelf in art shops, we tend to take them from granted,
and it is easy to forget that these colors had to be invented, one by one,
in what was sometimes a painstaking process. Artists of earlier times had
a much more limited palette, and some of those colors were immensely expensive,
while some were unstable and tended to fade or darken. In order to make
and to know how to use their materials, painters once had to be something
of a chemist themselves. I will trace the chemical history of the pigments
on the artist?s palette, and show how the invention of new color constantly
transformed art. To learn more about Philip Ball, isit his website at http://www.philipball.com/ |
|