The colorful and thick paintings on the canvas are all painted by the painters who painstakingly used their own romantic ideas to integrate the thousands of feelings in their hearts with thousands of pigments. Their colors are sometimes like the dim yellow lighthouse on the sea in the dark night, sometimes like the distant singing of sleepless people in the distance, and sometimes like the red sun in the early morning sky.
Painters originate from art, and most art workers have a romantic and passionate heart. Mood is color, color is pigment, and pigment is chemistry. If there were no chemistry, the painter's canvas would not be so colorful. If there were no chemistry, the painter's canvas would be a void, just like the distant moon, with only exposed gray rocks, black silhouettes of craters, and yellowed debris. Stone grains and floating soil have no other colors. In the entanglement of chemistry and pigments, blue is undoubtedly the most representative. Chemistry has pulled it from the peak of gold value to a position where even a poor painter can use it at will, mixing it out of thousands of colors to create the purest blue.
Look at Van Gogh's "Starry Night" and "Starry Sky Over the Rhone", both of which use blue as one of the main colors. The former shows the depression and melancholy of blue through the twisted vortex of the starry sky, while the latter shows the romance and tranquility of blue through the vast sky and river reflecting each other. In an art era where blue performs wonderfully, think about the early history of art. Blue pigments were scarce and expensive, and painters went to great lengths to create blue.
The ancient Egyptians heated limestone, sand and copper-containing minerals to 1470 to 1650 degrees Fahrenheit, then crushed the resulting opaque blue glass and mixed it with egg whites and gum. Through this complex production The process resulted in a long-lasting pigment - Egyptian blue. Although Egyptian blue was eventually eliminated from today's pigment production due to its complexity, it is still active in biomedical analysis and laser research due to its ability to emit infrared light.
In the history of the development of blue, it has been as valuable as gold several times. In medieval Europe, the value of blue pigment lived up to expectations and reached the peak of pigments. The reason is that the blue color at that time could only be extracted from lapis lazuli, and this stone was only found in a mountain range in Afghanistan. Its value can be imagined. As blue gradually became the representative color of clothing for the Virgin Mary, the French royal family, King Arthur and the nobility, it also gradually became a symbol of nobility and even power.
If blue pigments remain at this expensive price, Van Gogh will abandon his classic blue starry sky series, and Picasso will not be able to enter his glorious blue period. Fanatic artists like Van Gogh and Picasso, who are willing to do anything for the sake of art, if Prussian blue had not been born, they would have ended up painting blue and Johannes Vermeer who painted "Girl with a Pearl Earring". The same outcome - debt and poverty from an indulgence in dark blue paint. In 1704, Disbach mixed plant ash and cow blood for roasting, then leached the roasted material with water. After filtering out the insoluble substances, a clear solution was obtained. After the solution was evaporated and concentrated, a yellow color was precipitated. crystal. When Disbach put this yellow crystal into a solution of ferric chloride, he got a bright blue precipitate, which was as good as the expensive dark blue at the time. This is the Prussian blue (iron ferrocyanide) that rescued painters from the dark blue money abyss. Its birth symbolizes that painters can use blue to outline their sky, sea, starry sky, and even All fantasy stuff.
When it comes to blue, we have to talk about a short-lived but colorful artist in the history of art - Yves Klein. The sky and blue are the symbols of his wild and uninhibited artistic career. Just like he and his two best friends joked about dividing the world, he chose the last one among "earth," "language" and "sky", entangled and merged with blue throughout his life, and finally fell into the abyss of blue. "Klein Blue" is the world's first and only patented color. It was picked out from thousands of chemical color reactions by a person who controls blue and regards it as the color of his life.
< p> From the step-by-step development of pigments, from the thousands of reaction colors in experiments, and from the colorful appearance of crystals, we can see the close relationship between chemistry and color. If we look at it purely from the perspective of color, isn’t chemistry just a colorful thing? A world of color?