BRIGHT EARTH
A LOOK AT THE USE OF COLOR IN WESTERN ART THROUGH THE EYES OF A SCIENTIST

Philip Ball

7:30 p.m.
1800 Engineering Hall
U of W campus, Madison

Tuesday, March 29th, 2005

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/