We're very grateful to Nick Harkness and our "Canberra Colour Club" for organizing a very special event for our October webinar, a presentation by Dr Juraj Lipscher, co-author of the magnificent German book on pigments and dyes, Das Farbenbuch. Registration has now opened for CSA members and will open for nonmembers on September 26.
Das Farbenbuch by Juraj Lipscher, Stefan Muntwyler and Hanspeter Schneider is a remarkable book of 496 pages illustrating 367 pigments and dyes and also containing 17 pigment analyses of paintings, a timeline for the historical use of pigments,19 extensive and richly illustrated color stories, and a glossary and pigment index. For his webinar, Juraj Lipscher will discuss the motivation and main tenets of the book with a short overview of its contents centered around the interface between science and art. He will show examples from the compendium of pigments and dyes featuring handmade painted swatches, photographs of the coloring agents, and examples of paintings where the pigments were prominently used. Further on, he will present pigment analyses of paintings from all historical periods and examples of longer stories about an important coloring agent or an important colour. In the second part of the talk, he will explain the reasons for developing a proprietary 18-colours printing process for the book, discuss its technical aspects, and compare the results with the conventional 4-colours printing process.
Dr. Juraj Lipscher was born in Prague in former Czechoslovakia. After moving to Switzerland in 1968, he studied Chemistry at the University of Zurich, where he obtained his PhD in physical chemistry. He then worked as a chemistry teacher at the college level in Switzerland until his retirement in 2014. Juraj Lipscher has published numerous publications, especially on interdisciplinary topics such as chemistry and art, chemistry and crime, order and chaos, the chemistry of photography, etc. In 2010, he was awarded the Balmer Prize by the Swiss Chemical Society for innovative chemistry teaching. After his retirement, he was employed as a research fellow at the MINT Learning Center at ETH Zurich (Swiss Institute of Technology). For more than twenty years, he has been interested in the interface between science and art, especially in the methods used to analyze works of art. His website colourlex.com is considered the international standard in the field of painting materials and pigment analyses of paintings and is visited by thousands of people every day.
His photographs have been shown in exhibitions in Zurich, Lausanne (Musée de l'Elysée), New York, Paris, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and France and published in magazines such as NZZ Folio, Fotonews (DE), European Photography (DE) and Fotograf (CZ).
Juraj's co-authors on Das Farbenbuch were Hanspeter Schneider and the late Stefan Muntwyler. Hanspeter Schneider was born in Switzerland and studied graphic design in Zurich. He was responsible for the artistic design of Das Farbenbuch and developed the proprietary 18-color printing process employed in producing the book. Stefan Muntwyler was born in Switzerland and studied Art in Zurich and was the artist in the team. Stefan passed away in 2023.
REGISTRATION
This webinar is free to CSA members and nonmembers but registration is essential and limited to 100 participants worldwide, so early registration is advised. Registration has now opened for CSA members and will open for nonmembers of the CSA on September 26. Successful registrants will be notified by reply email and will be sent the link and instructions to join the webinar on the Zoom platform shortly before the event. To receive this email with the Zoom link, you must register by the deadline of midnight AEDT on Tuesday October 8th, but please note that this webinar may be booked out in advance of that date. (Our September webinar with Julie Kleine was booked out almost a week in advance)
If you're a non-member unable to attend live but would like temporary access to a recording of this webinar, please do not register but send a request for access to csa.nsw.chair@gmail.com by April 23. (CSA members have permanent access to the recordings of all our webinars).
This presentation will be of interest to the general public as well as to anyone dealing professionally with pigments and dyes, painting and commercial printing. We ask our members and friends to please pass on news of this important presentation to their contacts using the following link: https://coloursociety.org.au/event-5817477.
