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

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WHAT PAINTING IS 111 spoon as it is about to set. There is drier paint around the eyes, and the bags under the eyes are inspissated hunks of paint, troweled over thin, greyish underpainting. The grey, which is left naked at the corner of the eye and in the folds between the bags, is the imprimatura, and the skin over it is heavy, thick, and clammy. The same technique served for the wings of the nose, where dribbles of paint come down to meet the nostril but stop short, leaving a gap where the grey shows through. Of course, the nostril is not a hole, but a plug of Burnt Sienna with Lamp Black, and it also lies on top of the grey imprimatura. Rembrandt’s thin moustache is painted with wiggles of buttery paint, almost like milk clinging to a real moustache. Over the eyes and eyelids there are thick strips of burned earth pigments— Lamp Black and Burnt Sienna—covering everything underneath. The tar spreads up and inward, and then falls into the hollows between the eyes and the nose in dense pools like duplicate pupils. There is no limit to this kind of description, because Rembrandt’s paint covers the full range of organic substances. It is more fully paint, more completely an inventory of what can happen between water and stone, than the other examples in this book. And that means it is also more directly expressive of qualities and properties: it is warm, greasy, oily, waxy, earthy, watery, inspissate. It is not dried rock, like Monet’s cathedral, nor water, like his marine paintings. The thoughts that crowd in on me when I look at this paint have very little to do with the underlying triad, or with the named pigments or oils. They are thoughts about qualities: I feel viscid. My body is snared in the glues and emulsions, and I feel the pull of them on my thoughts. I want to wash my face. This is how substances occupy the mind: they congeal it into their own image. The painter’s face becomes a portrait of the substances that filled his mind. For the alchemists all this was usually terribly literal. They often wanted to eat what they had made, as if the ingestion would transport the qualities into their bodies where meditation would not. Edible gold was a common goal. Some recipes are genuinely edible, even if they wouldn’t be good for you (there are mixtures of gold and honey, and gold and salt). Others are poisonous. Joseph Du Chesne, a late sixteenth century physician and alchemist, tells how to make edible gold by pouring blue
112 HOW DO SUBSTANCES OCCUPY THE MIND? vitriol (copper sulfate pentahydrate) over tin powder, resulting in “the most beautiful yellow water in the world.” 30 It is left overnight, and then the next day the alchemist pours it over gold leaves and adds “very fine brandy” (tres-excellente eau de vie). If it is heated long enough, the gold will turn to oil, and can be taken internally for “all diseases of the lungs, the stomach, and the heart, in short, for all kinds of illnesses and infirmities…It is also excellent for the prolongation of life and the prevention of all kinds of diseases.” This is the quackery that eventually hurt the alchemists, but it also has its deeper truths. There is something beneficial about seeing gold turn to yellow water, and then to oil, just as there is something eloquent and unanswerable about Rembrandt’s pastes. It could even be said this way: substances not only occupy the mind, they become the mind.
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More praise for What Painting Is
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Published in 2000 by Routledge 29 W
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Wer lange lebt, hat viel erfahren,
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Color Plates All color plates excep
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Introduction WATER AND STONES. Thos
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INTRODUCTION 3 moment, and in the s
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INTRODUCTION 5 So this is not a boo
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INTRODUCTION 7 way to understand ho
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A SHORT COURSE IN FORGETTING CHEMIS
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Tin is made from pure quicksilver m
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WHAT PAINTING IS 45 mark on it. As
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WHAT PAINTING IS 47 they are entire
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WHAT PAINTING IS 49 will tell you
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WHAT PAINTING IS 51 but a source of
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WHAT PAINTING IS 53 be more monstro
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WHAT PAINTING IS 55 lower one blue.
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WHAT PAINTING IS 57 they are painte
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WHAT PAINTING IS 59 other garden pl
Page 70 and 71: WHAT PAINTING IS 61 FIG. 1 Oppopana
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Page 74 and 75: WHAT PAINTING IS 65 the same as wat
Page 76 and 77: WHAT PAINTING IS 67 alchemists saw
Page 78 and 79: 3 The mouldy materia prima IT IS PO
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Page 82 and 83: WHAT PAINTING IS 73 oil, canvas, sq
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Page 90 and 91: hapsody on salt. Welling says that
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Page 94 and 95: WHAT PAINTING IS 85 FIG. 2 Noah’s
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Page 116 and 117: WHAT PAINTING IS 107 It’s importa
Page 118 and 119: WHAT PAINTING IS 109 qualities, pri
Page 122 and 123: 5 Coagulating, cohobating, macerati
Page 124 and 125: COAGULATING, COHOBATING, MACERATING
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THE STUDIO AS A KIND OF PSYCHOSIS 1
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THE STUDIO AS A KIND OF PSYCHOSIS 1
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7 Steplessness IN THE BEGINNING the
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WHAT PAINTING IS 167 just above the
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WHAT PAINTING IS 169 (6) Set the lo
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WHAT PAINTING IS 171 to unify it. O
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WHAT PAINTING IS 173 image from man
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WHAT PAINTING IS 175 others have th
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8 The beautiful reddish light of th
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THE BEAUTIFUL REDDISH LIGHT OF THE
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9 Last words IN THE END, what is pa
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WHAT PAINTING IS 189 social nicetie
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WHAT PAINTING IS 191 reason has to
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WHAT PAINTING IS 193 last fifty yea
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 195 source is Cr
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 197 1. On this q
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 199 1655), 90, 1
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 201 6. The conce
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 203 “Gnosticis
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 205 Antimony, tr
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 207 1. Emmens, A
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 209 19. Titus Bu
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35. A theory of pictorial chaos is
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auriferœ, quam chemiam vocant, 3 v
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 215 until all (o
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 217 Make an amal
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 219 the “alreo
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32. Ibid., 144. 33. For the mixture
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NOTES TO CHAPTER I 223 “Place 8 g
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J.M. Eder, Quellenschriften zu den
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Abstract Expressionism, 89-94, 153
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lapis lazuli; ultramarine; Woad bod
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Duenech, 126-7 Dürer, Albrecht, 17
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heart, human, 27 heat, see fire; te
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lioness, 53 liquids, 1-2, 110 see a
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pine, 123 poppyseed, 123 precious,
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for gold, using silver and a burnin
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stannic sulfide, 183 star of David,
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sulfur virgin, 82 of the sun, 177 V
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What Painting Is: How to Think about Oil Painting ... - Victoria Vesna

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