The Science of Paintings

I am a chemist and am starting a new course called "The chemistry of Art" in the fall for the liberal arts students. I found the book to be an excellent reference and starting point for what I want to teach in the course. My background is in analytical chemistry and forensics and I already have large number of students interested in taking the course when it starts next fall.

This book is a wonderful reference book for artists to have in their library! There are a lot of technical formulas and equations, but it does help artists to understand the Old Masters works.

I can't say that the class this book was for was very interesting or easy to understand. But at least I had this book to make this a bit easier by explaining things for me.

Not what I was really looking for, however, I will pass it on.

I am a painter and I wanted to know a little bit more about the science of the materials I use. This is why I got this book. Unfortunately, the book only goes into depth on the science of the perception of art (how light reacts to colors like primary and secondary colors). There are other chapters about the materials of various types of painting like oil, tempera, encaustic, but the author only skimmed over these details with very little scientific explanation. Also, the author wrote the book to a crowd of non-artists. He often wrote about artists in third person. This was bothersome since a large portion of the book was over elementary aspects of art- for example "What is Painting?" was one of the topics he went into depth on.I did find out some interesting facts from the book like honey used to be used as a binder for paints, and that animal glue is in gesso. The chapter on how art historians detect fakes also was pretty interesting too. Beyond these little bits of information though, I found little useful information for my practice.