PHOTO: Pablo Picasso. Death of Casagemas. 1901. Oil on wood. Musée Picasso, Paris, France.
Last month chemists at Oregon State University (OSU) discovered a brand new variation of blue manganese pigment. The big news that it appears to be environmentally friendly, non-toxic, safe for humans, cheap as well as incredibly vibrant.
Manganese Blue has a long history of problems, especially for those who work with the raw pigments making the paint. For this reason, most acrylic paint companies do not make TRUE manganese blue paint.
Most use synthetic substitues. Old Holland still produces the real, manganese blue paint but I know of no others. (feel free to correct this in my reply section at the bottom of this page.)
For thousands of years, dating back to the Egyptians, man has sought after the perfect blue pigment. Most true blue pigments have later been found to be toxic and dangerous. Many alternatives are fugitive, fading after a few years.
This new discovery of brilliant blue was completely accidental.
“Basically, this was an accidental discovery,” said Mas Subramanian, the Milton Harris Professor of Materials Science in the OSU Department of Chemistry. “We were exploring manganese oxides for some interesting electronic properties they have, something that can be both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic at the same time. Our work had nothing to do with looking for a pigment.
“Then one day a graduate student who is working in the project was taking samples out of a very hot furnace while I was walking by, and it was blue, a very beautiful blue,” he said. “I realized immediately that something amazing had happened.”
What had happened, the researchers said, was that at about 1,200 degrees centigrade – almost 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit – this otherwise innocuous manganese oxide turned into a vivid blue compound that could be used to make a pigment able to resist heat and acid, be environmentally benign and cheap to produce from a readily available mineral.
– Source: www.physorg.com
If you are the scientific type you can read the complete findings in The Journal of the American Chemical Society. The Abstract is titled Mn3+ in Trigonal Bipyramidal Coordination: A New Blue Chromophore.
There is a patent pending for the pigment, so it will be awhile before we see it show up on the marketplace in the form of acrylic paint. But this could be very exciting news for artists.
Like Picasso, with this new pigment we can expect to see more artists going through their very own Blue Period!
