What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

WHAT PAINTING IS 93
with the correct substance: otherwise they would risk losing
years of work. But more subtly, they worried about the idea of
beginning, of needing to start somewhere. After all, the first
verses of Genesis are not exactly comforting: they are as deeply
mysterious as the Western mind can stand, and they are hardly
good models for a poor alchemist’s experiments. None of the
other options are that soothing, either: beginning in dung heaps
could not be counted as a promising idea, and starting from lead
—the sickest of the metals, the one farthest from redemption—
must have seemed a desperate measure.
It is beginning itself that is fraught. In the original Hebrew, the
first verse of Genesis begins obliquely, as if it were trying to
sneak into the creation story. In English we have it: “In the
beginning, God created…” but the Hebrew is “In the beginning of
God’s creating of the heavens and earth…” It is never easy to
begin, and the English misses that subtlety. Artists of all kinds
have difficulties beginning. Physically, it is hard to pick up the
brush. Mentally, it is hard to decide what to do first. What kind
of beginning should it be? One that builds rationally from canvas
to varnish? One that starts wildly, with big inspiring gestures? In
his early days as a literary critic, Edward Said wrote a book called
Beginnings, unraveling poets’ strategies. 36 If there is one subject
that is treated in every one of the thousand-odd artist’s manuals,
it is starting a painting. Along with knowing how to finish a
painting, starting may be the most common topic of conversation
between artists.
But in all that talking and all those books, there is very little
said about what it means to begin in different ways. Artists tend
to trade confidences and tricks: how to make yourself start, how
to start easily or quickly. The how-to manuals are all recipes for
avoiding interesting beginnings in favor of pre-tested ones. Paint
is especially difficult to start with: as you can imagine if you’re a
non-painter, the lifeless lumps on the palette and the pristine
canvas can be horrible specters, or implacable enemies. The
alchemists thought longest and most freely about how to begin
with substances, and it is their myths that I invoke when I think
of starting.