Secondary School Feature Article JCE Classroom Activity #38; Pigments of Your Imagination: Making Artist's Paints, p 1320A, by Nancy S. Gettys.

Chemistry and Art or Art and Chemistry?

The theme for the ACS-sponsored National Chemistry Week 2001 is Chemistry and Art. As chemistry teachers, we tend to put chemistry before art. However, the students whom we would like to interest in chemistry may be inclined to think art first, and perhaps some chemistry students' thoughts exclude art. Activities and information based on this year's theme have great potential to interest students for whom art holds more appeal than science. Kathleen Thompson, ACS Manager of Community Activities and a former high school teacher, has put together a great program that will be useful in the chemistry classroom as well as in reaching out to the public to carry the message that chemistry is relevant to many fields of endeavor.¹

In cooperation with the ACS Office of Community Activities, the JCE is proud to provide a set of additional resources relating art and chemistry in this and next month's issue. For the chemistry teacher these resources will be useful for many years and throughout the chemistry curriculum. They could also be the basis for fruitful collaboration with an art teacher to develop an interdisciplinary unit within your school.

In her article, Chemistry, Color, and Art, Mary Virginia Orna quotes Michael Freemantle's statement "color is the most visual, pervasive example of the importance of chemistry to our lives" (1). Although I will never be accused of being artistic, I strongly identify with that quotation. The colors of various chemicals had a great deal to do with my being attracted to chemistry. The changing color of an acid-base indicator and the varied colors of compounds on the supply shelves caught my eye early in high school chemistry, and they do still. Alas, I did not go to the library to investigate what these marvelous colors were used for, and no mention was made in the text or in class that these relatively simple compounds might be used as pigments in artist's paints. Orna's account, with its color illustrations, provides the connection to both inorganic and organic compounds. It also provides the historical context, introducing still another interdisciplinary connection. Chemistry, art, and history also come alive in an article by Allen Denio, The Joy of Color in Ceramic Glazes with the Help of Redox Chemistry . JCE Classroom Activity #38, Pigments of Your Imagination: Making Artist's Paints can be used to actively involve students in connecting chemistry to art.

Articles relating chemistry and art are not new to the pages of JCE. Erica Jacobsen has compiled a comprehensive annotated bibliography specifically for this issue. The 75 citations are organized into 10 categories, such as Glass, Pottery, and Ceramics; Light and Color; and Textiles and Paper. This article will be a valuable resource to teachers--I will certainly include it in the collection of resource materials that I use in my courses.

My decision to emphasize interdisciplinary connections was influenced not only by the NCW-related articles but also by a Chemical Education Research article, The Connection between Success in a Freshman Chemistry Class and a Student's Jungian Personality Type, by Gale J. Clark and Wayne D. Riley. Although the authors did not specifically relate a personality type to an attraction to the arts, their results indicate that certain personality types are more common in students who do very well in introductory chemistry and that other personality types are often characteristic of students who do poorly. The point is not to suggest that students of the arts are less likely to be successful in chemistry class--I can think of many exceptions and I expect that you can too. Rather, we need to be mindful of the breadth of interests and tendencies represented in our classes. Quoting from the article: "Too often, the initial excitement seen in beginning-level students fades when symbols have to be learned or equations balanced."

JCE publications regularly make connections to a wide variety of interests, of which art is but one. Interdisciplinary Connections is a High School Feature Column designed to meet this challenge. Articles have been published relating literature (2) and writing (3) to chemistry. If you have developed interdisciplinary connections that you would like to share with other teachers, I encourage you to contact the feature editor, Mark Alber.² Additional examples of annotated bibliographies on chemical connections to other disciplines or applications include food science (4), environmental concerns (5), and writing (6,7). The online "Search" link in the left-hand column of the home page of HS CLIC can lead to the discovery of articles relevant to many other interests. Happy connecting!

Note

1. For more information about NCW, visit their Web site.
2. For the feature mission statement and contact information see the HS CLIC Web site.

Literature Cited

1. Chem. Eng. News 2001, 79 (Feb 26), 50.
2. Thoman, C. J. J. Chem. Educ. 1998, 75, 495.
3. Alber, M. J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78, 478.
4. Jacobsen, E. K. J. Chem. Educ.2000, 77, 1256.
5. Moore, J. W.; Moore, E. A. J. Chem. Educ. 1976, 53, 167; 1976, 53, 240; 1975, 52, 288.
6. Shires, N. P. J. Chem. Educ. 1991, 68, 494.
7. Waterman, E. L. J. Chem. Educ. 1981, 58, 826.