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

WHAT PAINTING IS 173
image from many directions and without breaks for separate
steps.
All this is ingrained in modern art, and I am certainly not
pining for the old academies. The new alla prima methods, where
the paint goes onto the canvas all at once, open a tremendous
range of possibilities for painting that never existed before. But
they also create a fundamental anxiety that has accompanied
modernism since the final decay of the academies at the end of the
nineteenth century: it is no longer clear that painting is
something that requires a body of knowledge, that can be learned
and studied. It may be stepless, beyond the reach of any routine
education. Painting and alchemy are arts, backed by massive
literatures on technique and tradition, but they feel like they
might collapse at any moment into ruleless experience. Like an
alchemist’s shelves, a palette can be very orderly, with all the
pigments arranged according to hue, value, and chroma—or it
can be a wasteland of mottled smudges with no rhyme or reason.
A painter’s or an alchemist’s method can be an orderly
progression from the prima materia up to the final crowning step—
or it can be a constant thrashing-about in a ruleless place where
history and scholarship are no help at all. Alchemical and
painterly methods share a giddy possibility: even though they
are arcane and exquisitely difficult to master, they might also be
shams, so that the years spent learning them might be useless and
misguided.
The fundamental anxiety of painterly or alchemical method is
that it may not exist. Both artists and alchemists have
traditionally worked to obscure this harsh choice by debating the
exact nature of their processes. For alchemists, the controversy
centers on the number of steps required by the great work. Of all
numbers, four is the one most insisted upon. One of Johann
Daniel Mylius’s emblems shows the four “alchemical sisters” or
“virgins of the sun” sitting at an outdoor table (Figure 8). They
balance on symbols of the four Greek elements. Above them a
vaulting arc indicates the sun’s yearly movements. The labor is
sometimes imagined as a natural cycle (opus circulatorium), so
that it would take place in a year. The sisters are seated at the
cardinal points of the zodiac. On their heads are the hermetic
vessels, each with the appropriate stage: black or nigredo,
symbolized by an “little inky man”; white or albedo, symbolized
by a white rose; yellow or citrinitas, symbolized by an eagle