The Chemistry of Blue

For Kokkie Schnetz, colour is never just a surface. It’s a conversation between matter and light, time and transformation. As a researcher in cultural heritage science, she studies the hidden chemistry behind the world’s most famous colours , like the deep ultramarine of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Her work on “Evidence for the Catalytic Properties of Ultramarine Pigment” revealed that this legendary blue is not inert at all: it reacts. It ages, it breathes, it slowly changes the materials around it. What painters once thought eternal turns out to be alive: catalysing tiny, invisible processes inside the paint itself.
For Kokkie, that discovery was never just technical. It was poetic. “Even colour has a pulse,” she once said.

Where Art Meets Science

Kokkie’s research sits at the crossroads of chemistry and art history.
She examines how light interacts with matter, how pigments evolve, and how paintings (like stars) hold both brilliance and decay within them. Her world is full of microscopes, spectra, and centuries-old paint flakes that still whisper stories of creation.

That same fascination with light drew her into Total Together. What began in the lab, light scattering in a Vermeer blue, now stretches into the sky: the fading corona of a total eclipse, the subtle tones of twilight, the shared awe when darkness blooms in daylight.

The Reflective Mind

In the group, Kokkie is the quiet analyst, the one who links beauty to understanding. She reminds everyone that observation is also interpretation, that every lens, every pigment, every photon tells a story about transformation. Her presence brings depth, patience, and wonder grounded in science.

Because whether it’s Vermeer’s blue or the shadow of the moon, Kokkie knows:
light never just shows us things: it changes them.