Where Chemistry and Art Meet

Chemistry and art students are invading each others territory this semester at Carnegie Mellon University. They are participating in a new course called The Color of Minerals & Inorganic Pigments, which is being team taught by Catalina Achim, assistant professor of chemistry, and Clayton Merrell, associate professor of art.

The professors came up with the idea for the class after they discovered during a faculty meeting that they share an interest in geology. Achim takes the students in her undergraduate inorganic course to the gem and mineral hall at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History each year. Merrell often makes paintings that include geological information. That started us thinking about going from chemistry through mineralogy to the pigments and thus to the chemistry of art, Achim says.

Six chemistry majors and six art students are taking the class. For many of the art students, its their first chemistry class since high school. Despite the artists having no college chemistry experience and the chemists having no art experience, the course is being taught at an advanced level in both subjects.

The classroom portion includes lectures in chemistry, art, and art history, as well as demonstrations such as the mixing of light. To give the class more technical depth for the chemistry students, Achim sometimes takes them aside for brief periods during the lab or studio time to discuss more advanced topics. Merrell does the same for the art students.

The class offers an opportunity to create a studio course that goes in depth in a different way than the art students are used to, Merrell says. Theyre very interested in learning more about their materials. As artists, we are often at the mercy of the people who make and sell our materials.

For the chemists, its a good illustration of what happens in real life, Achim says. We build on what they have learned in each of the core science courses. They see how knowledge that they may have acquired in physics or physical chemistry or inorganic chemistry is used to explain the color of art materials.

There were no formal prerequisites for the art students, all of whom turned out to be seniors. Because Achim wanted the class to be an advanced chemistry class, the chemistry students have all taken at least one previous lab class and the inorganic chemistry core course, which chemistry majors usually take in the spring of their sophomore year. I wanted the chemistry students to have enough experience to be able to think on their own when learning about a new, interdisciplinary field, Achim says.

The students have been getting hands-on experience in both the lab and the studio. They have explored color mixing, learned to use colorimeters, synthesized inorganic pigments, and used those pigments to make their own egg tempera paint. Were expecting all the students to do the work in chemistry and to do the work in the art studio as well, Merrell says. Were asking them to help each other along the way to make that successful.

For their final projects, the students will step into the unknown as the chemists and artists pair up to apply what theyve learned in chemistry and art.

Were asking them essentially to invent a way of making an image that uses the chemical interaction of the pigments or the interactions of the pigments with different lighting situations, Merrell says. The students will harness the chemistry as they create their artwork. For instance, many pigments change over time. What if the students can intentionally incorporate these changes as part of their artwork? These final projects, started in the middle of October, will be displayed during the universitys exam period.

The popular course will be offered every two years. This year, students snapped up the available spaces on the first day of open enrollment.

We werent sure there would be that kind of demand from the students because it is such an unusual course and expectations are so different from what theyre used to, Merrell says. A lot of students ask when are we teaching it again and how can they get in.