Organic chemistry teacher has passion for art, history

 

David Cordes, an artist who teaches organic chemistry at Pacific University in Forest Grove, says his paintings are “thought provoking.” The many colors, faces and text integrated into each of his pieces will likely make you agree.

“Reflections on Organic Chemistry,” featuring Cordes’ artwork, will be on display in the Fireside Gallery through Oct. 27. The exhibit offers 17 paintings and a wide range of chemistry topics, including posing notable scientists as paintings subject.

Cordes is from New York City, raised in Queens and later living in Brooklyn and Manhattan. He studied history at Hunter College in the city, then moved west and taught high school and junior high school history in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He grew more interested in science and decided to study chemistry in California, before migrating north to Oregon. “I really like the Northwest over all; it’s a glorious place,” he said.

Despite teaching at a private university, Cordes said community colleges hold a special place in his heart. “I had my first chemistry class at a community college in California and it made all the difference in my career. I was very inspired by the people there and by the environment, and I see MHCC as one of those kinds of places,” he said.

Besides his artwork, Cordes is doing research for a new series on alchemy and its history. He enjoys playing the bass and guitar in his spare time, and is learning to play the organ.

His paintings require a lengthy creation process, he said. “What I’ll tend to do is just sketch out kind of an initial picture right on the canvas and gradually work it out from there, consulting organic chemistry text books, history of chemistry books, online resources, maps, as well anything that kind of bears on the story.”

Cordes said he is a “very slow and deliberate kind of painter. The paints are quite thick… you can see that (his work) is very saturated colors, it’s all oil on canvas.”

His love for teaching and chemistry is clear in his paintings, which blend text, portraits and other abstract techniques. Each portrait is unique in the sense that it tells a story. “As humans we like stories, we like narratives and we like tragedy and comedy,” he said. “I think you can inject some of those ‘Aha!’ comedic and tragic kind of elements into the stories behind each of the paintings.”

His pieces aren’t meant as teaching aids, he said, but instead are “more meant to represent at least my own impressions about particular characters and themes in organic chemistry.”

One standout story is that of August Wilhelm Hofman, a 19th century Jew who was both beloved and hated at the same time. Anti-semantic groups wanted Hofman removed from the university where he taught, said Cordes, whose portrait features examples of molecules he helped to map.

He hopes someday to display his past and new artwork together in one place, perhaps in a textbook, for use as a learning tool for students.

Cordes has big plans for his future artwork. He would like to pay tribute to Linus Pauling, an Oregonian who won a rare science-related Nobel Prize for “incredible work on the structure of proteins” who also worked against the spread of nuclear weapons, he said. Pauling is one of his favorites because “he was able to bring together the humanities and the sciences. He’s going to be a special subject for a painting.”

That level of enthusiasm is apparent in Cordes’ displayed collection at Mt. Hood, which he describes like this: “(A) number of very colorful, kind of exciting, bright, cheerful, paintings that can get you excited about science, or at least get you to ask some questions about science and ponder some of the early history there.”