The Quest to Understand—and Mimic—Nature’s Trickiest Colors

It was an image in a book of a sparkly blue fish—a West Indian Ocean coelacanth—that inspired German painter Franziska Schenk to begin a project that would occupy much of her adult life. “It was mysterious and beautiful,” she says, “and as a child I had been enamored with the sea.” She became engrossed with trying to capture that elusive beauty in her art. Making iridescent paintings would not only prove a technical challenge, but would also force Schenk to explore some of the exotic ways that