How does science combine with art and creativity?
We're here in Indianapolis, Indiana, at the Indianapolis
Museum of Art, to check out two amazing exhibits that
overview everything from X-ray technology
to the history of paint.
You've got to follow me and check this out.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Dr. Gregory Smith, I am so excited to go in this exhibit.
So, tell me more about the chemistry of color.
So you put this together, then.
There was a group of us that put together
a show that really tries to bring together art and science
and talk about how the demands of artists and fashion
and designers drove scientists to make
new discoveries in color, and how
these discoveries in science and chemistry,
some of them serendipitous, ultimately led to materials
that have benefited the arts.
Whoa.
This is going to be fascinating.
Let's-- can we go get started?
Let's go!
Let's do it.
Follow us.
So can you please just kind of take us through,
what are we looking at?
And this-- is it a timeline?
It's a timeline.
We tell this as a chronology that starts here,
in the Neolithic period, and it'll
bring you right up to today.
Wow.
OK.
So, I-- this kind of this last [INAUDIBLE]
picture, going on, here.
What are we looking at?
That's right.
So we're starting at the very beginning,
with sort of prehistoric use of color.
People have always wanted bright colors
to try and represent their world or decorate their objects.
So we're starting, here at--
going way back to 270,000 BC.
And primarily, in that time period,
the colors are coming from rocks and minerals
that would be ground up.
So, we're dealing with the iron earth, the ochers and umbers.
So these are the iron-rich clay materials
that have colors like red and yellow, browns, and greens.
And then these would be dug up, crushed to create the pigments.
And here you see an ancient Chinese vessel
that has this deep maroon, red pigment, which
is an iron-oxide pigment.
We have examples of the raw material, here.
You can see that the rocks on this side
have that deep red color.
These are hematite, so they're loaded with iron oxides.
And then, just the addition of moisture, of water,
creates a different mineral, goethite and limonite,
which are the yellow ochers.
And so, even at those early time periods,
people were doing chemistry.
They found that, if they took the yellow rock,
they could roast it over a fire, drive off that moisture,
and generate the red material.
No way!
Exactly.
Wow.
Yeah, so, what are we looking at now?
Well, we're looking at ancient Egypt.
So we've got an Egyptian mummy mask, here.
You can see that deep-blue coloration of the mask.
That's a pigment called "Egyptian blue."
So blue has always been one of those favorite colors
of artists, and yet nature doesn't give you
a lot of blue things to use as pigment.
So, early on, people were wanting to make blue pigments.
And way back in 3,000 BCE, the first purely synthetic artist's
material was Egyptian blue.
You can see some examples of these lumps of Egyptian blue,
here, that I made in the laboratory.
Egyptian blue is made in a furnace.
So, the early chemist would have mixed together
sand and embalming salts and chalk,
and a source of copper, either copper shavings or a copper
mineral.
This gets ground up, put into a furnace,
cooked at this super-high temperature for 10
hours, 100 hours.
And what comes out are these blue lumps
of a glassy frit called "Egyptian blue."
You can grind this up into pigment
and then use it for decoration.
And so we've got a video, here, which is actually taking you
through that process of producing the pigment,
grinding it up, and making an egg-tempera paint.
So I see, we've got, like, a tapestry on this one,
and a lot of red.
So, what are we looking at, here?
This is a Baluchi rug--
nomadic people of Afghanistan.
And we often think about, where does color come from,
and people will guess, you know, it's extracted from plants
or maybe it's ground-up stones.
But what if I told you that we get color
from animals, that we can squeeze color from an animal?
Sounds gross, but--
[LAUGHTER]
Well, this is an example.
This is the dye carmine, which is extracted
from the cochineal insect.
So this is a small beetle which infests--
Whoa!
--cacti in the American Southwest and South America.
And inside this bug is produced a deep-red dye
called "carminic acid."
And that gives us the red color of your Persian carpets,
and things of that sort.
It's a very ancient colorant.
And we've got a video, here, which
shows how you can extract that from the bugs
and use it to dye cloth, to dye fibers for weaving.
NATE HECK: Oh, wow.
I mean, that was my next question, is, who--
who thought to squeeze--
I mean, this bug could barely fit on the tip of my finger.
So, how did they ever figure out that-- the power of that dye?
GREGORY SMITH: Well, you can simply--
on a cactus, if you were to try to brush these things off,
your hand would become stained with red,
as you damaged the insect.
So, I think this is a pretty clear instance of where
it would become obvious that something's
special about this little bug.
OK, so what do we-- where are we at, here, now?
Well, if you thought the bug juice was unusual,
what if I told you that you can get color from urine?
Bizarre.
[LAUGH]
Yes.
So, this is the pigment Indian yellow, which has always
been said to have been manufactured from cow urine,
the cows being fed a diet of exclusively mango leaves.
No kidding.
So this urine would be dried down.
You can see a ball of Indian yellow, a historic ball
of Indian yellow.
And here you see it being used in this Indian miniature
painting, this manuscript.
So all of the bright yellows--
and, in fact, even the green--
the green is a mixture of Indian yellow and indigo,
which is the dye that's in your blue jeans.
Wow.
This has an unusual property that, under a black light,
it glows this very bright, yellow, intense yellow color.
And so it's very easy for us to identify it in our collection,
with something as simple as a black light.
NATE HECK: Tell me about this.
This is a great painting by the artist Charles Laval.
It's called "Going to Market, Brittany."
And it highlights one of the colors that I really love,
emerald green.
So emerald green was discovered in 1814.
It was actually an improvement on an earlier pigment,
from the late 1700s, called "Scheele's green."
Scheele was a well-known chemist.
For instance, he discovered oxygen and chlorine.
Really!
He also made this brilliant green pigment,
which was really beneficial because most
of the greens that were available
were not very strong or very durable.
So, unfortunately, his green was a mixture
of copper and arsenic.
And so it was a--
Arsenic's bad, right?
[LAUGH]
Arsenic is a poison.
And so, even the improvement, the emerald green from 1814,
still copper and arsenic.
It gives you this very vivid green color.
And what's interesting is, because it's toxic,
it actually had a second use.
So, if you were manufacturing this bright-green pigment,
you would sell out of one door to the artists.
You would sell out of the other door to exterminators.
And so you'll find it marketed as "Paris green," as a poison
for insects and rodents.
Oh, wow!
So, yeah, it was very toxic.
Very toxic.
All right.
So, over here, now, we've got black paint?
We're talking about black, the color black.
And we're talking about a pigment called "aniline black."
And it's interesting, because it's
one of our first synthetic organic pigments.
And being black is kind of important,
because historically, if you wanted something black,
you really had two options.
You burnt something-- it could be as pedestrian as burning
lamp oil and getting soot black, or as exotic as burning
elephant task and getting ivory black--
or, if you were dying a cloth and you wanted it black,
you had to dip it in multiple colors, to get the black.
OK, that makes sense.
So this was the first material manufactured
in a laboratory, an organic pigment that
produced a black color.
And importantly, it was formed or synthesized in the fabric
itself, which made it very washfast and very durable.
It could also be made into a pigment.
Here, you see an example of a contemporary Japanese woodblock
print, and that very velvety black background
is aniline black.
But it's not over.
We haven't found the perfect black, at that point.
Blacks continue to be created, including
this example, Vantablack, which was discovered in 2014.
It's the blackest material on earth.
And it's made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes,
so it's very high-tech, space-age.
This is above me.
[LAUGH] Oh, wow.
And what we're showing here is an example
of a crumpled bit of aluminum that has
been coated with this material.
So, from the sides, you can see that that's
a bendy, foldy bit of aluminum.
But when you look at it head-on, it looks like a black square.
You can't see its--
No.
--shape, because it's absorbing all the light.
It is, yeah.
I mean, you think you've seen black as black,
but that-- yeah, I had no idea it was even curved.
Yeah, exactly.
And so its uses are in astronomy and defense and military sort
of applications.
There's, in fact, only one artist
who is licensed to use this particular black pigment.
Wow.
So you have to have a license to use this.
From the company that manufactures it--
Surrey Nanosystems.
Wow.
OK, that's just amazing.
Tell me what we're looking at in this really neat exhibit.
Well, here we have a line of test tubes that have been
filled with Day-Glo colors.
So, Day-Glos are these daylight fluorescent materials.
So, to kind of break that down, they are pigments that not only
reflect light and give you color,
but anything that they absorb they will then reemit
as that same reflected color.
So you get kind of a double punch of intensity--
Yeah.
--which makes them seem abnormally bright,
for the ambient lighting.
Yeah, they almost look like they're-- they're lit,
because they're that intense.
They are light bulbs.
They are glowing with their own intensity.
Man!
So how would an artist use this?
What do you do with this?
Well, we have some great examples, here.
We're not showing the actual artworks, because unfortunately
Day-Glo colors, especially historically,
were sensitive to light, and they would fade over time.
But these are examples of objects
that are in our collection-- the Keith Haring
and the Stefano Castronovo Sprouse jacket.
So you can see just how attention-grabbing those colors
are, just how vivid they are.
And, of course, around town, you're
going to be familiar with Day-Glo
as the color of advertising.
So it really catches people's attention,
when these billboards are glowing, or signs are glowing,
product labels are glowing, with that intensity.
Yeah, I had no idea.
So, literally, they grind this up, then,
to make it into different applications?
Well, they're unusual as pigments,
too, because, unlike the minerals and the other things
that we've been talking about, these
are actually dyes that are impregnated
into a piece of plastic.
And then the sheet of plastic is ground up in a mill,
to form a fine powder.
That's your pigment.
Wow.
I had no idea that's where that came from.
OK, Dr. Greg, thank you so much for what you guys are
doing at the museum, here.
This exhibit is amazing.
Thank you so much.
It was great-- great having you here.
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