Two questions often arise when people are looking at my art – Why and how do you do it?

Why?
It may sound surprising to many, but chemistry and art are interconnected in a profound way. They have shared creativity and innovation since the birth of art, beginning with the first use of pigments for body decoration (about 100,000 years ago) and cave art (about 40,000 years ago). These days, Contemporary Art uses new materials developed by scientists, to interpret and invent new kinds of art, such as:
• multimedia paintings, that use of new pigments and a variety of new support materials.
• sculpture, ceramic, and glass using new pigments, additives, and materials to create works that would not have been possible a century ago.
• and more recently, installations, holographic art, digital art, to name few.

Producing artwork requires a degree of technique and materials knowledge in addition to the original inspiration; therefore the intertwining between technical knowledge and creativity has become more sophisticated.
In this context, using chemistry and physics to create art is not a big jump – so I jumped. For those who debate the use of the term art to describe these new creations, I am reminded of a quote from Edward de Bono (on of the pioneers of Brain Training and the inventor of the Lateral Thinking technique): “Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.”

My DECOSCIENCE™ adventure started in the lab when it was necessary to make a chemical reaction visible to a naked eye so we could learn about its behaviour. My training in pigments, chemistry and physics allowed me to find the right reactive pigment formulations. With a bit of help from our synthetic chemist, it was possible to custom modify the molecules to give them exactly the right properties. To capture the ever-changing state of these reactions, I used some scientific photography techniques to record what we observed in the lab. During the development of this capability, it became apparent that one could explore /rethink the relationship between chemistry and art. By using my technical knowledge, I could deliberately create art.

How?
In the case of my video on this website, I started the project with a concept that I wanted to capture on video; it was my tribute to Mark Rothko’s art from his late period – Color Field Painting. From the chemistry perspective, the challenge was to create an experiment that would reflect his distinctive style of overlapping layers of colours and emulate his different textures in each colour block. To be able to obtain three the distinctive layers, I choose water and an oil (everyone knows water and oil don’t mix) but I needed a third layer in between, so I chose an organosilicone fluid that I knew would be immiscible with both the oil and water, had the right density to be between the oil and water; it also has low viscosity to allow good fluid movement and the ability to solubilize my main reactive ingredient. I needed some red and yellow colours so I chose my pigments: chlorophyll (found in dark green vegetables) and curcumin (found in turmeric).

My main reactive ingredient was a custom-made base, which is essentially a big oily molecule with a basic OH on one end so it behaves like a soap (in other words, it helps dissolve other molecules in oil and in water); I coloured this solution yellow-orange. Then I created the second solution (Green in visible light) using an diester that I knew was very reactive with my base; it is helpful to have a lab. For my the third solution (Red in visible light), I chose Oil of Wintergreen, or as we like to call it in the lab “methyl salicylate”. To increase the pH and the rate of reaction, I added a bit of potassium hydroxide (another strong base) with a bit of fluorescein to obtain the fluorescent green under UV light.

The end result was the overlapping layers and textures in the colour blocks that form my tribute to Mark Rothko.

–Dana Plesa